The final cut of Scream 5, officially titled SCREAM, is complete. In an Instagram post Monday night, co-director Tyler Gillett revealed that the sequel to the beloved horror franchise is “picture locked,” meaning that the edit of the film is now set as it moves into other stages of post-production. The post includes a photo of Fox’s Newman Scoring Stage, where the score was being recorded. In a similar post, the film’s other director, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin announced that the score is also complete, showing a closeup of some sheet music.
The posts offer a rare glimpse behind the scenes of a project whose details have been carefully guarded. In addition to using multiple versions of the script to avoid any potential leaks, Gilet and Bettinelli-Olpin worked on multiple cuts of the film simultaneously. This has helped prevent leaks since the filming wrapped in November, but those guardrails fall away now that the cut is picture locked.
This isn’t the first horror film for the directing team, who previously collaborated on 2019’s darkly funny Ready or Not. They clearly have a lot of reverence for the genre, as well as to the work of Scream creator Wes Craven, as Bettinelli-Olpin explained last year:
The movie has a lot to do with the current state of horror, but one of the things we talked about is that, unlike when the original started and horror was sort of on a downward path and it wasn't that popular anymore, people outside of the mainstream were still into it, but the mainstream had given up on horror. That's not where we're at now obviously. Horror is as big as anything right now, and so it's fun to go at it from that angle, but also at the same time for us, scary is scary, and it always will be. If something's truly scary, it's just going to be f*cking scary and that's our aim. And that's something we learned from Wes Craven going all the way back to Last House on the Left. Nightmare on Elm Street was probably one of the first horror movies any of us saw that truly scared us in a major, major way seeing that as a kid. When it comes to that kind of thing, I think that's one of our main goals is just to make sure that the scary is scary and not try to be gentle about it.
The film sees the return of the franchise’s main cast, including Neve Campbell as Sidney Prescott, David Arquette as Dewey Riley, and Courteney Cox as Gale Weathers (with Roger L. Jackson once again providing the voice of Ghostface). Last month, in an interview with Drew Barrymore (who appeared in the original Scream), Cox clarified the nature of the sequel. “It's not a reboot, it's not a remake, it’s just a brand new launch,” she explained. “I think it’s going to be fantastic.”
SCREAM is scheduled to release on January 14, 2022. Check out Gillett and Bettinelli-Olpin’s Instagram posts below.