Like with any great horror movie franchise, production companies just can’t help but to make a sequel after financial success in the box office. “Scream” is no stranger to this, and it is starting to show.

For a franchise that has gone for over 30 years now, it was inevitable to return a very rinse and repeat style of writing. What hurts is that the movie series had switched it up for the better with the fifth and sixth installments that featured new faces to the franchise, but they just couldn’t help but to return to its original roots, which cost them deeply. “Scream” has never had an objectively bad movie, but if one had to take the title of “Worst Scream Sequel”, it would be the most recent installment.

Neve Campbell returns as Sidney Prescott after sitting out “Scream 6”, and is without a doubt the best part of the seventh installment and carries the weak supporting cast around her, even her mainstay co-star Courteney Cox.

Campbell brings back the fire from the original final girl for what could be one last time. The past of Sidney Prescott comes back to haunt her and her family, a premise that if done right could be entertaining but again, was played out too safe and never really made you feel worried for the family, knowing that everything was most likely to play out in their favor in the end.

Besides using the return of the original news reporter final girl duo to bring in viewers, “Scream 7” plays its cards right with fans of the series. The film is packed with easter eggs that both die hard and casual fans of the film franchise will recognize, including the return of Stu Macher, or at least what the audience thought was his return.

One of the main plot lines the movie follows involves toying with the popular fan theory that Stu Macher, one of the killers of the original movie, was still alive. What may seem like fan service and nostalgia bait, was actually a rather entertaining highlight of the film and done fairly well with another thing that the Scream series has done time and time again, and that’s being meta.

“Scream” is iconic for always bringing new ways to reel in meta topics to use in their movies, making it the gift that keeps on giving in an ever-changing world. After all, the original 1996 film was a self-aware meta horror movie that changed the way people looked at scary films forever. For “Scream 7”, the meta theme this time around involved AI use and deepfake technology.

The concept in itself is interesting, but wasn’t executed as well as it could’ve been. The way it was utilized felt boring and very safe and was what made the movie feel so predictable. Just like it does to movies in real life, AI ripped out a little of the magic that made “Scream” great, which was its classic whodunit unpredictability. 

The predictable, sometimes boring, sometime entertaining “Scream 7” was just enough to have the biggest opening weekend box office earnings of the franchise, beating the previous installment. This of course means only one thing: another sequel in the works. If the quality of the films themselves continues to decline like the franchise’s latest, like one of Ghostface’s victims, the “Scream” series will bleed out and die.