The story of the next Scream sequel (Scream VII for those keeping score at home) is coming into focus with the news that the movie will feature the grown daughter one of one of the franchise’s original heroes, Sidney Prescott, played by Neve Campbell.
After sitting out Scream VI, Campbell is expected to return for the film as well.
Per Variety, the character of Sidney’s daughter will be played by Isabel May, who is known for portraying Elsa Dutton on the Yellowstone spinoffs 1883 and 1923.
READ MORE: 10 Horror Movies So Extreme They Made People Sick
Scream 7 has not had an easy development process, despite coming on the heels of two fairly successful franchise-revitalizing legacyquels, 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI. While those films featured the surviving original Scream characters to some degree, including Campbell’s Sidney plus Courteney Cox’s Gale Weathers and David Arquette’s Dewey Riley, their main stars were a new generation of younger actors. Most centrally, they followed a pair of sisters, played by Melissa Barrera and Jenna Ortega, who turn out to have a connection to the original Ghostface.
But then Barrera was fired from Scream VII, allegedly over controversial social media posts, and Ortega dropped out of the film as well. The project’s director, Christopher Landon, then left as well, and later said publicly that the gig was “a dream job that turned into a nightmare.”
Eventually, Kevin Williamson, the co-creator of the franchise and a writer on Scream, Scream 2, and Scream 4, came aboard to direct. It is his first time directing a movie in the series, and only the second time in his career that he’s directed a feature film.
The recent sequels did establish that Sidney had started a family between Scream 4 and Scream, but I’m not sure the math checks out for her to have a daughter as old as Isabel May. According to Wikipedia, her first child was born in roughly 2013. May is 24 years old. So either the film will be set a few years in the future, May will be playing much younger than her real age, or the film will just retcon what they’d previously established about Sidney’s family.
Scream 7 is scheduled to open in theaters on February 27, 2026.
Every Scream Movie Ranked
Ghostface has slashed his way through more than two decades of horror movies. Here‘s how they all stack up against each other.