Scream 5 Finally Has A Release Date
Horror in the nineties belonged to Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson. In 1996, the pair unleashed Scream onto the world — a winking, self-aware homage to the modern American slasher.
In the film, while Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) plays out the role of the stereotypical final girl, her friend Randy (Jamie Kennedy) does something that would become a staple of horror movie-making forever after: he explains the rules of the horror movie they are in. In the years that followed, Williamson capitalized on the popularity of Scream and wrote similar films like The Faculty, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, and I Know What You Did Last Summer (which is currently slated for a new entry, itself). But no matter how many similar movies came around, Scream was destined to be the series that was remembered.
It's been nearly a decade, as of this writing, since Neve Campbell and the gang all returned for Scream 4. And while there were three seasons of a Scream TV series, those stories exist outside of the movie universe — different heroes, different killers, and even a different Ghostface mask.
It's hard to imagine Scream without Craven, who died in 2015. Still, fans were excited to hear that Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette are all returning for a fifth movie, co-directed by Ready or Not team Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.
And now, fans can be even more excited, because we finally know when the new film — simply titled Scream — is being released to theaters.
What a January 2022 release means for Scream
It has officially been announced on Twitter that Scream will release in one year's time, on January 14, 2022.
Historically speaking, there is no standard release date for a Scream movie. The first two films released in the month of December, the third in February, and the fourth in April. Ready or Not (the co-directors' previous film) came out in August.
Still, it's safe to say that January is an extremely unusual month to release a major film from one of the most iconic franchises in cinematic history. January is a very common month for horror movies ... but that's not exactly the great news fans want it to be, because January is also somewhat infamous as a month where studios dump movies they don't expect to perform well at the box office. In 2020, five major horror movies came out in January: The Grudge, Underwater, The Turning, and Gretel & Hansel. Of those five, only Gretel & Hansel has a fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The only franchise film of the bunch, The Grudge, was technically a box office success with just under $50 million at the box office, but was still mostly trounced by critics.
On the other hand, Sam Mendes' World War I epic, 1917, had a January 2020 release. And horror movie success stories like Cloverfield, From Dusk Till Dawn, Split, and Tremors all saw releases in the month of January. Also, the general landscape for theatrical releases, in a post-COVID world, is different than anything seen in the past. Theater closings in 2020 continued into 2021, with Warner Bros releasing all of their big movies to HBO Max the same day they hit theaters. It's quite likely that the entirety of 2022 will be a packed month for major film releases, no matter what.