Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson, who worked on all four previous movies, details the bloody and surprising original opening scene for Scream 4. The Scream franchise is well-known for its star-studded pre-credits sequences, paying homage to the iconic opening scene of the first film, which was a chilling 15-minute sequence where Drew Barrymore's Casey Becker was menaced by Ghostface over the phone and eventually murdered, despite the fact that she was billed as the star of the movie in all the promotional material. Scream 2 carried on this tradition with an opening scene that featured Jada Pinkett and Omar Epps being killed at the premiere of Stab, a fictional movie based on the events of the first Scream. Scream 3 promised to shake up the rules by killing off franchise character Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) and his girlfriend, played by Melrose Place's Kelly Rutherford.
2011's Scream 4, which came out over a decade after the previous entry was the first time the franchise refreshed itself for a new generation before the new fifth entry, also titled Scream. That film's central meta conceit revolved around the franchise that spawned from the original Stab film, to which the events of Scream 4 were essentially a reboot. To pay homage to that idea, the intro is a triple opening scene, in which the Ghostface menaces victims is what is revealed to be the opening of Stab 5, being watched by two women who are revealed to be in the opening of Stab 6, being watched by sisters who are in the "real world" of Scream 4. This nested sequence includes cameos from young stars including Lucy Hale, Kristen Bell, and Anna Paquin.
Speaking with EW, Williamson revealed his original intention for the opening of Scream 4. His first draft of the script featured returning character Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) fighting off another Ghostface killer before the events of the film picked up two years later. The twist on the traditional Scream intro would be the fact that "she didn't die. The killer died." Craven and Williamson reworked the scene to include more young stars in cameos, but that moment was eventually reworked and included in the pilot of Williamson's show The Following. Read the full quote below:
She fought for her life. It was a big, huge, 15-minute fight where she kept stabbing the killer, the killer kept stabbing her. I think she was stabbed five times, and crawling across the floor. And then she killed the killer, and the surprise was she didn't die [like the characters attacked in the openings of the three previous Scream films]. The killer died.
And then one night, I remember I was just up at 3:00 in the morning, and I had this idea, and I just started writing to see where it went. I did the movie within a movie [concept] because I knew Sidney was coming in with a self-help book, and I didn't know how that would land. I wanted to make sure that we kept Stab alive because that's the fun part of the deconstruction of the film, and so I just wrote that in one night.
It is currently unknown how the opening scene of 2022's Scream will play out, or who will be featured in it. It seems unlikely that the original Scream 4 draft will be brought back, considering that the trailer has already revealed the scene featuring the return of Sidney Prescott. There's a possibility it may include Marley Shelton's Judy Hicks, a legacy character from Scream 4 who doesn't necessarily need to be featured as a main cast member, though it's more likely that it will be some inspired cameo pulled from the roster of modern beloved stars.
Although the original intro to Scream 4 would have been more of a subversion of expectations, it doesn't make as much sense overall. Reintroducing Sidney a decade later, only to reintroduce her two years later in just 20 minutes of screen time, would have been confusing for audience members. Although Sidney is still the main target of the killer in that particular entry, it also would have prioritized the new teen characters even more, giving them less time to establish themselves as a new crop of victims for viewers to care about.
Source: EW
