Many will remember that “Scream 7” saw a rather large controversy when Spyglass Media decided to fire franchise actress Melissa Barrera for sharing a tame pro-Palenstine post on social media. That choice eventually led to backlash, with the project’s director, Christopher Landon, exiting, making way for franchise screenwriter Kevin Williamson to replace him as the studio chugged along on the horror legacy film.
Landon spoke with Vanity Fair to promote his latest film, “Drop,” and revealed that he and his family endured abuse and death threats in the wake of the Barrera’s firing by the studio, which led to the involvement of the FBI. For some context, Landon has two sons, ages five and eight, with husband Cody Morris making this a very scary situation.
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“People were threatening to kill me and my family, to the point where the FBI was getting involved,” the director said of his shocking experience. “I got messages saying, ‘I’m going to find your kids, and I’m going to kill them because you support child murder’…The head of security at various studios and the FBI had to examine the threats. It was highly aggressive and really scary.”
Despite previously stating on social media that he wasn’t behind the firing, Landon wanted to double down on that point, “I did not fire her. A lot of people think I had something to do with it, and it was not my doing. I had no control of the situation at all…I think in the absence of people understanding how Hollywood works and what the hierarchy is, the fans were like, ‘that’s the guy.’ And so they came for me, knives out.”
As Landon tells it Spyglass was still hopeful he’d continue with the film, “They wanted me to continue on. They basically said, ‘You can restart it. You can figure it out.’ But the amount of abuse that I had to deal with—I decided I didn’t want to give any part of myself to that.”
“There’s no resentment at all,” Landon said when the studio pivoted and hired Williamson to replace him. “What else are you going to do? Wallow? Then they win. My best revenge was making something cool, and I feel like I did with ‘Drop.’ My revenge wasn’t rooted in pain or anger; it was rooted in joy and moving forward.” Adding kind words for Williams, “I want [“Scream 7″] to succeed. Kevin probably made a banger of a movie because he knows it better than anybody. It’s going to be awesome.”
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“Scream 7” is, of course, moving along with Williamson in the director’s chair as they’ve assembled a cast with original actors Neve Campbell, Matthew Lillard, David Arquette, and Courteney Cox alongside Isabel May, Celeste O’Connor, Mckenna Grace, Sam Rechner, Asa Germaan, Anna Camp, and Mark Consuelos.
Paramount Pictures, the film’s distribution partner, has set a release date for “Scream 7” for February 27, 2026.
