Scream fans were delighted when Paramount announced a sixth entry in the franchise, but the news came with a caveat: Neve Campbell wouldn’t be coming back.
In June 2022, the Party of Five alum, who played Sidney Prescott in all five previous Scream movies, revealed that she exited the project over a salary dispute. “Sadly, I won’t be making the next Scream film,” she told Us Weekly in a statement. “As a woman I have had to work extremely hard in my career to establish my value, especially when it comes to Scream. I felt the offer that was presented to me did not equate to the value I have brought to the franchise.”
The Canada native noted that it was a “very difficult decision to move on” from the beloved horror franchise. “To all my Scream fans, I love you,” she continued. “You’ve always been so incredibly supportive to me. I’m forever grateful to you and to what this franchise has given me over the past 25 years.”
The first Scream film debuted in 1996 and also starred Drew Barrymore, Courteney Cox, David Arquette and Skeet Ulrich. After three sequels and a decade-long break, the franchise returned to the big screen in January 2022 with a fifth slasher simply titled Scream. It marked the first installment in the series that wasn’t directed by the late Wes Craven, but several of the original cast members — including Cox, Arquette and Campbell — returned for the flick.
Arquette, for his part, was happy to reunite with everyone for the movie — including his ex-wife, Cox, whom he met on the set of the original Scream. “It’s great when you know people really well and you get to act opposite them,” he told Us in January 2022 of working with the Friends alum. “There’s just little stuff about them in general as people, so it makes it really comfortable. And, you know, they say, like, 80 percent of communication is nonverbal. So, the more you know someone, obviously you’re gonna have advantages.”
The fifth Scream — spoiler alert — featured the death of Arquette’s character, Dewey Riley, but it left the door open for Campbell and Cox to return. After the Skyscraper actress announced she wouldn’t come back, one of her newer costars weighed in to express support for her decision.
“I absolutely respect her for that,” Jasmine Savoy Brown, who made her Scream debut in the 2022 film, told Variety that June. “I think that it’s hard to be a woman in this industry and in any industry at all. If any person, but especially any woman, feels that she deserves more — whether that’s a financial situation with work, out of a relationship, out of fill in the blank — if she can walk away, I support that.”
Keep scrolling for more reactions to Campbell’s exit from the sixth Scream movie.