Neve Campbell won’t be playing Scream‘s original victim, Sidney Prescott, in next year’s Scream 6.
“Sadly, I won’t be making the next Scream film,” Yahoo Entertainment confirmed that she said, as first reported by Deadline. “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. It’s been a very difficult decision to move on. To all my Scream fans, I love you. 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.”
Campbell, who currently stars on Netflix’s series The Lincoln Lawyer, portrayed Prescott in the first three films in the horror franchise, released between 1996 and 2000, before returning for Scream 4 in 2011 and in this year’s Scream. The next installment, 2023’s Scream 6, is expected to co-star Courteney Cox, another original cast member, as well as Hayden Panettiere, who starred in the 2022 Scream. (Campbell was not involved in the Scream TV series, which aired from 2015 to 2019.)
The latest Scream movie cost $25 million to make and brought in $140 million at the worldwide box office, according to Variety. While Campbell did not specify the salary that she was offered, she mentioned in an October 2020 conversation with Jamie Lee Curtis, who played Michael Myers’s victim Laurie Strode in the successful Halloween franchise, for that publication, that it had not been on par with what the men in smash hit franchises had been paid.
“The industry has no problem when a man makes millions of dollars on something that’s a franchise,” Curtis said. “We as a society go, ‘Good on ya!’ But then if a woman says, ‘Well, I would like that same piece of the pie,’ I think people would think you’re being greedy, or you’re not being grateful. As if somehow we as women have to be just grateful for the opportunity. Which we already explained we are!”
To which Campbell responded, “We would like to make equal.”
“We have both worked for many, many, many years to continue our careers,” Curtis said. “At some point it’s OK to say, ‘No, I’m going to get paid this or I’m not going to be able to play in your sandbox.’
Campbell said then that she “did all right” with Scream 3, but did not get a back-end deal, which would have given her a cut of the movie’s profits.
