‘Scream VI’ Director Reveals how the Narrative Was Altered When Neve Campbell Exited from the Project

Last June, fans of the Scream franchise were taken aback after Neve Campbell announced she wouldn’t be appearing in the sixth installment due to a financial disagreement with the studio.

In her statement, the actress who played Sidney Prescott in five of the six movies of Scream disclosed why she decided to no longer be part of it: she felt that the offer given was not proportional to all that she had contributed. Despite the production crew declining to respond at first, Campbell still received encouragement from several members of her co-star cast.

Time flew by, and the directors of Scream – Tyler Gillett and Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, producer Chad Villella as well as writers James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick divulged some difficulties they confronted when producing Scream VI subsequent to Campbell’s departure. In a conversation with Collider, Bettinelli-Olpin revealed that Campbell had left before pre-production began on the film. Fortunately for them it happened so soon that they had enough time to go through several drafts. He said,”

“We found out early on in pre-production that Neve wasn’t gonna do this one and there had been drafts and ideas and stuff going around, but the thing that Guy and Jamie did that was so great and really helped us is that they had created the structure of the movie that I don’t think ever really changed much. Stuff like the motives, that shifted, but the movie from kind of a bird’s eye view didn’t change that much.”

Subsequently in the conversation, Bettinelli-Olpin revealed that though they were all “disheartened” after discovering Campbell would not be repeating her role as Sidney Prescott, they were committed to showcasing the traits of their fresh cast members so moviegoers could gain familiarity with them and eventually love them just as much. He noticeably stated while discussing legacy characters such as Sidney Prescott, Dewey Riley (David Arquette) and Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox),

“Obviously we were super bummed when Neve wasn’t going to do it, and the thing that we immediately went to was like, ‘Okay, if we’re not doing this with Neve again, we have to make sure that you fall in love with these characters the way that we all fell in love with Sidney and Gale and Dewey.’ So we took that responsibility really, really seriously and made sure that if we do our job right, you leave this movie going, ‘Oh, I love the Core Four and I want their journey to continue the same way that we all want Sidney and Gale and Dewey to continue.’”

Scream VI is now playing in theaters.