A major star has been removed from the Scream franchise. Melissa Barrera, who has played the central figure in the two recent Scream revivals, has reportedly been dropped from the upcoming seventh film in the series in the wake of posts she made to social media about the Israel-Hamas War.
Per THR, her posts included comments like “Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp” and “People have learnt nothing from our histories. And just like our histories, people are still silently watching it all happen. THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING.”
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In Scream and Scream VI, Barrera played Sam, who turns out to be the daughter of Billy Loomis, one of the two killers in the original Scream movie from the 1990s. In both recent sequels, Sam and her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega) are hunted by new Ghostfaces, who target the women in part because of their connection to the original films. Sam, meanwhile, begins to experience hallucinations of Billy Loomis, and even wonders if she is destined to become a serial killer herself.
These questions and Sam’s backstory were central to these new Scream movies. A seventh movie was already in the works, with Happy Death Day’s Christopher Landon set to direct it. So if Barrera and Sam are no longer connected to the franchise, that presumably throws a major wrench into Landon’s plans, especially since almost all of the legacy characters from the old Screams having been killed or written out of the movies by this point. (It’s possible the Sam role could be recast with a new actress.)
Scream VII is in development, but it does not have an official release date yet.
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