Sure, Courteney Cox will come back to watch all her friends get murdered in Scream 5
The Scream franchise puts a lot of emphasis on how many dang people get murdered when they’re around Neve Campbell’s resident doom magnet Sydney Prescott. But it’s not like reporter and author Gale Weathers—played by Courteney Cox, in what’s probably the second-most iconic role of her career—doesn’t have a pretty massive “Oh, hey, everyone I talked to today is dead now” bodycount herself. So it’s bad news for the citizens of Scream Land today to hear that Cox has signed on to reprise the role in the franchise’s fifth installment, probably trawling a whole new batch of fresh corpses in her wake.
Scream 5—picking the franchise up after a 9-year lacuna—is being directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, previously of V/H/S and last year’s pretty great “What if the Bluths were devil-worshiping murderers?” horror comedy Ready Or Not. So far, Campbell hasn’t signed on to return to the franchise, but Cox does join ex David Arquette (whose Dewey Riley is just as steeped in mask-related knife murders, now that we think about it) in returning to the series. The film is the first in the Scream series not to be directed by Wes Craven, who died in 2015, and the second not to be written by Kevin Williamson, who sat out Scream 3. (Williamson returns as an executive producer on this one, but the writing duties are being handled by Amazing Spider-Man’s James Vanderbilt and Ready Or Not writer Guy Busick.)
Scream 5 is currently pointed toward a 2021 release, although god knows how that’ll end up turning out. Cox announced her return to the series with an Instagram post with strong “Advertisement for your local Halloween store” energy, which feels about right.