While 80s nostalgia has reigned supreme for a while, a trend is beginning to emerge where 90s-based properties are popping up with increased frequency. Jonah Hill‘s upcoming film Mid-90s, Netflix’s short-lived series Everything Sucks!, 90s-set films such as Super Dark Times are just a few that come to mind.
Throw in Hollywood’s love of remakes/reboots, and it’s only a matter of time until one of the most memorable 90s films, Scream, gets the reboot treatment. It’s certainly something Jason Blum, head of horror studio Blumhouse, has been thinking about.
In an interview with Forbes, he was asked whether the rumour was true that his studio was looking to snap up the rights to both Scream and another popular 90s property, I Know What You Did Last Summer:
“I’d like to do that, yeah. I would like to do both of them, but it’s a rights situation with all those movies. It’s very tangled and very complicated. It’s one thing to say you want to do them and it’s a whole other thing to get to actually do it.
To give you some idea, Halloween was in the works with us for four or five years before it evolved, so, there are business obstacles to cross but, in theory, if you said to me, ‘would you like to do a Scream movie?’ my answer would be, ‘of course’. Sadly it doesn’t work like that”.
As Blum mentioned, his studio is behind the upcoming Halloween reboot/sequel, and with horror thriving thanks to films such as Get Out, Hereditary, and A Quiet Place, it would be no surprise to see the studio – or any studio – cash in and attempt a Scream reboot.
The only problem would be that Scream is a franchise very much rooted in the 90s, and came along at exactly the right time in all its meta, self-referential glory. As seen in the poorly thought-out franchise reboot in 2011, Scream 4, what made the franchise so good in the 90s doesn’t work nearly as well in a contemporary setting.
But we know that, at some point, a Scream reboot will indeed happen. It’s inevitable. So let’s just hope it’s a studio like Blumhouse that does purchase the rights and goes about attempting to reboot the film in the right way. If the early reaction to the new Halloween are anything to go by, they have a hit. Hopefully they can do the same with another horror icon if they get the opportunity.
#Peace.Love.Scream
