Scream 7’s Box Office And Rotten Tomatoes Score Are Big Surprises

There is an old adage that says “social media is not real life,” and if you want another example of that in the media landscape, look no further than what just happened with Scream 7, both in terms of audience scores and its overall box office returns this weekend.

Despite being lambasted by critics with a series-low 34% Rotten Tomatoes score, audiences have instead given it a quite good 78%, a 44% difference, which is a wide gap even when this sort of thing happens.

Past that, Scream 7 just opened with a stunning $64 million haul domestically, higher than 2023’s Scream 6 at $44 million and 2022’s Scream (5)’s at $30 million. Scream 7 has already made $97 million in its opening weekend globally, and it seems like it’s on pace to easily outgross those last two “revival” films.

Why was this “supposed” to fail? There was a volcanic river of online anger when Scream 5-6 actress Melissa Barrera was fired in November 2023 for her comments about the Israel-Gaza war and the treatment of the latter’s civilians. Then, her co-star and rising-star actress Jenna Ortega also departed, first citing scheduling, but later it seemed Barrera’s firing was a factor.

So, the movie lost two of its biggest, well-liked stars, and the spaces had to be filled by other young actors, but mainly reprisals from the franchise, like Neve Campbell. The idea was that the movie didn’t “deserve” to succeed, and at least ahead of this weekend, critics seemed to back that view purely on the film’s quality.