Scream 2022’s Twist Ending Almost Appeared WAY Earlier

Warning! This post contains spoilers for Scream (2022) and Scream (1996)

While Scream 2022’s killer reveal was undeniably effective, the ending was almost used much earlier in the Scream franchise. The Scream movies have never been able to top the killer reveal featured in the first film. Although each installment of the slasher franchise has come up with a clever answer to who Ghostface is each time, the ingenious simplicity of Scream‘s ending is almost impossible to recreate and, as such, the killer reveals have been a mixed bag in comparison with the original movie.

However, Scream 2022’s twisty story came close to matching Scream’s ending when the long-awaited sequel revealed that its killers were a pair of obsessive fans who loved the Stab franchise. Throughout Scream 2022, characters voiced opinions about the fictional Stab franchise that could have applied to the Scream series, a running meta-joke that reached its peak when the killers were revealed to be two Stab super fans who were willing to kill solely to get the franchise back in the multiplex. Surprisingly, despite how inventive this idea seems, the same twist originally appeared in the first draft of Scream 3.

Why Scream 3’s Ending Changed

According to a 2013 interview with E Entertainment, Scream co-creator/screenwriter Kevin Williamson wrote an early treatment of Scream 3 wherein the sequel’s villains were revealed to be a group of obsessed Stab fans, which is essentially exactly the plot that the long-awaited Scream 2022 went with. Scream’s original killers Stu and Billy were also technically big horror fans (and Scream 2’s Mickey wanted to blame his killing spree on “the movies”), but Scream 3’s villains would have taken this meta-joke further since they were explicitly a fan club dedicated to the Stab movies, the self-parody slasher series that mirrors Scream within the franchise’s universe.

However, Williamson’s vision for this ending never came close to fruition. Scream 3 suffered massive production problems post-Columbine, resulting in near-constant rewrites as executives demanded the sequel play up its comedic elements and play down the darkness, violence, and horror. As a result, Williamson ended up re-purposing this twist for his 2013 TV show The Following, and Scream 2022 was able to revisit the twist from another angle. While the upcoming sequel Scream 6 could touch on this idea again, it seems unlikely that the franchise will be able to pull off the story of obsessed Stab fans killing for the sake of their beloved series twice in a row.

How Scream 5 Changed Scream 3’s Original Ending

While Scream 2022 owes some creative debt to Scream 3’s original twist, the sequel did majorly alter Williamson’s original idea. At the end of the screenwriter’s Scream 3 treatment, it was revealed that an entire unstoppable cult of Stab fanatics was responsible for the killings (this was the unsettling image that was later reused in The Following). In contrast, in Scream 2022, only two killers are involved, and both die in the finale. Thus, Scream 2022 didn’t rob too much from the earlier Scream sequel’s original ending.