The future of the Scream franchise has been up in the air since the firing of Melissa Barrera from Scream 7 over her comments on the Israel-Gaza conflict, followed shortly after by the departure of Jenna Ortega and director Christopher Landon. While Barrera's firing was already seen as a major blow to the film, one of the series' original stars revealed the next Scream had big plans for Barrera's character.
Skeet Ulrich, who portrayed killer Billy Loomis in the original 1996 Scream, said Scream 7 was meant to be the conclusion of a three-film arc for Barrera's character, Sam Carpenter, that began in Scream 5, according to CBR. Ulrich said it was part of why he agreed to return for 2022's Scream, which revealed Sam as the illegitimate child of Loomis and teased a possible murderous connection between the two.
“I was hoping for exactly that, and that's sort of the idea that was pitched to me a couple years ago,” Ulrich said when asked if Scream 7 would have explored Sam's “killer” potential. “That it was a three-movie arc, with that in mind.”
“And I don't know, I mean, it's possible that it didn't include any of that as well. But yeah, that was my hope, is that if it was going to mean anything, that it directly impacted the plot.”
The relationship between Loomis and Sam was a key point of 2022's Scream as the latter wrestled the entire film with the fear of potentially turning into the killer her biological father was. It included hallucinations of her bloody father over the course of the film goading her to give into her instincts, which ultimately saved her and her sister, Tara, in the film's climax.
Scream 6 continued to explore Sam and Loomis' links, though Ulrich's screen time is only limited to one scene when Sam and Tara discover a shrine to the previous Ghostface killers.
Scream 7 is reportedly undergoing heavy rewrites as a result of losing Barrera and Ortega.
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