‘Scream 7’ brings David Arquette back from the dead (somehow)

There are a lot of ghost faces in the next Scream movie.

After confirming the franchise returns of Scott Foley and Matthew Lillard, whose characters both died in previous installments over the years, Scream 7 is now also bringing back David Arquette, Entertainment Weekly has learned.

Deadline Hollywood first reported the news.

Tyler Gillett, one of the filmmakers of the fifth Scream with Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, called reading about Dewey’s death in the script “f—ing gut-wrenching.” He told EW at the time, “It was like, we loved it, and we hated it, and it was brutal, and we also knew that we had to make a choice like that in this movie.”

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“I think there was some nerves about it,” Bettinelli-Olpin added. “I don’t think it was wholly embraced, you know, by David, or by us, for sure. There were nerves of, ‘Is this the right thing?’ In our first conversation with David, he said, ‘Think about it, think about it.’ But he understood that, in order for it to be a real Scream movie, and for it to have the teeth that Scream has, that this kind of thing needed to happen.”

So Dewey went off into the afterlife of Scream… but apparently there is now an after-afterlife. It’s unclear how the character will return in the context of Scream 7. The same goes for the other two that we know about. Lillard’s Stu Macher, one of two killers in the first movie with Skeet Ulrich’s Billy Loomis, died by the end of that film. Foley’s Roman Bridger died in Scream 3 at the hands of Dewey.

However, it was the 2022 Scream that set a ghostly precedent. Ulrich reappeared after all this time as the phantom memory of Billy lurking in the mind of his daughter, Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera). Perhaps Sidney is now facing the ghosts of her own past.

Directed by franchise scribe Kevin Williamson, Scream 7 will also feature Isabel May as Sidney’s daughter, Joel McHale as Sidney’s husband, Mason Gooding and Jasmin Savoy Brown as Chad and Mindy Meeks-Martin, and Cox as Gale. In confirmed but undisclosed roles are Mckenna Grace, Grace’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife costar Celeste O’Connor, Gen V‘s Asa Germann, The Fabelmans‘ Sam Rechner, Pitch Perfect‘s Anna Camp, and Mark Consuelos.

The film, currently in production, is scheduled to hit theaters Feb. 27, 2026.