When you ask a horror fan what their favorite Scream movie is, by and large the answer you will get is the original. The slasher subgenre, once so popular just a decade before, had collapsed under the weight of so many underwhelming and ridiculous sequels to franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare of Elm Street. It took writer Kevin Williamson, and the genius behind A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven, to bring slashers back.
1996's Scream was a slasher like we'd never seen before, with its meta understanding of horror film tropes, and an ending that revealed not one but two killers. It remains at the top of the Ghostface heap, though its sequel, 1997's Scream 2, gets a lot of love as well, as does 2011's Scream 4 and last year's Scream (2022).
'Scream 3' Is Seen By Most to be the Worst Film In the Franchise
When you ask a horror fan what their least favorite Scream movie is, the answer you will almost always get is Scream 3. It's the black sheep of the family, a film that, while not exactly horrible, falls far short of the inventiveness and fun characters found in the other four entries.
Scream 3's lack of love comes from many reasons. One factor is that its biggest star, Neve Campbell, who played the ultimate final girl Sidney Prescott in every entry (sans the upcoming Scream VI sadly), has a smaller role. Her busy schedule with other projects, such as the Party of Five TV series and a supporting role in the film Drowning Mona, meant that she wasn't available as much. This led to David Arquette and Courteney Cox getting the most screen time, which is fine because they're great, but when Campbell isn't in many scenes, and Jamie Kennedy's Randy was killed off in the previous film, it left Scream 3 feeling like it was lacking star power.
Bringing in new actors was probably a great idea, so the franchise wouldn't start to feel stale and repetitive. It certainly worked with the likes of Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, Gen Z's reigning Scream Queen, taking the torch last year. Newness didn't work in Scream 3 though, where its additional supporting roles felt flat.
Then there was the story itself. Kevin Williamson, who wrote the first two entries, did not write the third. It shows. The third film leaves Woodsboro behind for Hollywood, where a new Ghostface is terrorizing the cast of the latest Stab film, based on the events of the Scream series. It sounds like a potentially fun idea on paper, but in practice it was flat dull and completely uninspired. The always anticipated killer reveal at the end didn't help matters. Sure, it was nice that they switched things up by just having one person under the Ghostface mask rather than two, but when the mask comes off, and it's the most boring and inconsequential character underneath, fans couldn't help but be disappointed.
Then there was his convoluted reasoning. The director of the latest Stab, a man named Roman Bridger (Scott Foley), just so happens to be the unknown half brother of Sidney. He's a man born to a failed actress who didn't want him, and now he's out for revenge, including, as it turns out, being the mastermind behind Billy and Stu's (Skeet Ulrich and Matthew Lillard) original chaos.
The secret brother trick is a much used staple of slasher films, and it could have worked here, had he been a character that we cared about at all. He's so unimportant that when he reveals himself to Sidney, it's the first time there characters have ever met. All of these things together led to a lazy and rushed feeling movie that was a dud of an ending to the original trilogy.
Matthew Lillard Had Been Hired to Return As Stu Macher In 'Scream 3'
There's a reason, however, why Scream 3 is so different from what came before it. It's because it was supposed to be something else completely. While Kevin Williamson still wouldn't have been the writer due to other commitments — mostly his work on Dawson's Creek — he did write out a treatment for what the third film would be. It was just a plan, but it had been acted on, with a cast being hired, including Matthew Lillard.
That last bit of info is a head scratcher, considering that Lillard's Stu Macher was presumably killed at the end of Scream when Sidney Prescott dropped a heavy TV on his head. No matter — his character was so hilarious and lovable, despite the whole murder thing, that fans have since clamored for him to return. Many may not know that we already got it, sort of. In Scream 2, Lillard has a brief "blink and you'll miss it" cameo in one scene.
Scream 3 wasn't going to be a cameo. Scream 3 was going to go all out with a shocker which showed that Stu was still very much alive. "I was supposed do Scream 3," Lillard told Vulture in 2022. "I got paid for 3. Not really well, but I ended up getting paid for something I didn’t do because the idea was that I’d be running high-school killers from jail."
Bringing back Stu would have been the dream come true for Scream fans. So, why didn't it happen? Unfortunately, the horrors of real life intervened during the film's early stages, creating a nightmare that became so engrained in our national psyche, that anything which reminded us of it was too much. That nightmare was Columbine.
The Tragic Real Life Events of the Columbine School Shooting Forced 'Scream 3' to Go a Different Route
Today, it is a sad state of our current reality that mass shootings, even in schools, have become accepted as part of the disgusting new normal. In 1999, however, it was still shocking when you'd turn on the news and see a giant banner on CNN announcing that some unfathomable number had died in a mass killing. On April 20th of that year, two high school students walked into their school and took the lives of 13 before taking their own lives as well.
As the nation's temperature rose, we looked for answers everywhere, for certainly there had to be some sensible reasoning for such madness. Some looked at music. Others turned their blame to video games. Many focused on violence in movies. Though there were no answers for how someone could do something so heinous, for Scream 3 there was an answer to whether the film could go on as it was: It couldn't.
In 2011, Lillard told the Bob Bendick Podcast, "From jail, I was kind of masterminding this attack against Sidney and so three weeks before we were supposed to start shooting, Columbine High School broke out, and they changed everything. They kind of took the script and threw it to the side. They bought me out, and I never did the third one."
The New Direction of 'Scream 3' Resulted In a Mess of a Film
Not only did that mean Lillard was out, but so was the setting of Woodsboro. Instead, the film's events moved to Hollywood, as far away from the feel of a high school and teenaged characters as you could get. The setting wasn't the only big difference. The tone had changed as well. While the Scream franchise has always been known for its humor, Scream 3 leaned into it even more, and with the kills toned down too, it meant that the final product was overly tame and simply uninteresting.
The writing credit for the film goes to Ehren Kruger, a talented writer, as proven two decades later when he would be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay due to his impressive work writing Top Gun: Maverick. With Scream 3, he did the best that he could give the circumstances and the short time he had to write something completely different from Williamson's pitch. In 2022, Kevin Williamson did an interview with Bloody-Disgusting, where he confessed that he didn't watch the final film in the original trilogy until many years later, when he had to before writing Scream 4. Williamson said that he didn't film scary and that "from a writing standpoint I could tell it was from a different hand."
Williamson is right. The tonal changes made for something almost unrecognizable from the first two films. Still, Scream 3 did succeed in one area. While the tragedy of Columbine meant that the film's original idea had to be scrapped, the second idea, a film that called out sexual abuse in Hollywood, turned out to predict the Me Too movement which would later change Hollywood forever, including taking down one of Scream 3's producers, Harvey Weinstein. For this, many now look at the film with a new appreciation.
Scream VI is currently playing in theaters everywhere.