Many slasher devotees were shocked by the death of Dewey Riley (David Arquette) in Scream 2022, with even star Courteney Cox objecting to his fate - but the decision to ignore these objections was the right choice. The original 1996 Scream movie left a quartet of characters alive for the sequel, those being Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), Gale Weathers (Cox), Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), and of course Dewey himself. Scream 2 proved those survivors weren't safe, killing off Randy in brutal fashion.
Yet, despite Scream 3 repeatedly stressing that in the third part of a trilogy, anyone can die, that didn't prove true. Sidney, Dewey, and Gale all survived, and the trio also survived Scream 4. On one hand, that's an understandable decision by late director Wes Craven, as he had come to love those characters just as much as the audience. At the same time though, many felt confident going into Scream 2022 that the franchise's core trinity weren't in any real danger, thanks to their improbable survival skills.
As was quickly learned upon Scream 2022's release, that assumption was misguided, as not only was Dewey murdered by the latest version of Ghostface, he was fully gutted. The harshness of Dewey's death left many viewers in shock. For her part, Courteney Cox recently said that she implored directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett to reconsider killing Dewey, or at least shoot a scene that would give them an out if they changed their mind. Cox's Dewey proposal was rejected, and as hard as Dewey's death was to watch, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett made the right move. Being a "requel," it was important for Scream 2022 to revive Scream for a new audience, while also doing justice to the legacy characters. In Dewey's case, his death was needed to put the sharp edge back in the franchise, and establish no one was safe.
It's no secret that, with the exception of hits like Halloween 2018, the slasher sub-genre of horror is far from the powerhouse it used to be. Scream 2022 went a long way toward reigniting that fire, but for its revamp of the franchise to be as successful as it was, at least one of the legacy characters needed to die, and Dewey was the best choice of the three. Dewey has always shown a tendency toward heroism, and has come close to death on several prior occasions while trying to protect others. His luck in that department finally ran out, as an attempt to make sure Ghostface was really dead proved to be his undoing.
Killing off Dewey immediately raised the stakes and added weight to the rest of Scream 2022, as if he could die, Sidney and Gale now actually seemed to be in danger. That's especially true thanks to the large cast of younger characters Scream 2022 introduces, many of which could conceivably return to populate the cast of Scream 6. While Scream 4 has its fans, it was a box office flop, and thus Scream 2022 needed to serve as an announcement that Ghostface was back and even more dangerous than before. With Scream 6 already slated for 2023, excited audiences will head into the theater with zero certainty as to who will live, and who will meet the business end of Ghostface's blade.