Depressingly, Disney responded by caving to these most toxic elements of fandom when the empty and soulless Episode IX, The Rise of Skywalker, was released in 2019 and undid much of what Johnson introduced to the series, including by sidelining Tran’s Rose Tico to less than a few minutes of screen time. Instead that movie returned to retreading the basic plot elements of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi (1983) and was generally better received, slightly, by the loudest voices of online Star Wars fandom. Ironically, and perhaps tellingly, it still made less money than The Last Jedi.
Scream 5 mocks this and even itself as it goes through the motions of a Star Wars legacy sequel, beginning with 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which similarly remade Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) in all but name, even as it killed off old fan favorites like Harrison Ford’s Han Solo. In Scream 5, longtime franchise stalwart Dewey Riley (David Arquette) is finally gutted after surviving nine stab wounds in four previous movies. Deliciously, as his murderer saps the last of their hero’s life, the Ghostface fangirl tell him, “It’s an honor.” She kills her idol with adulation.
Meanwhile Campbell’s Sidney Prescott has no time left for this bullshit after so many movies. She calls the killers—and the franchise—out on the repetitiveness.
“Oh there’s two of you. Again,” Sidney says with a hint of boredom when she gets her first phone call from the new Ghostface. She already has her gun out and little interest in conversing over creepy phone calls. “You might be the most derivative one of them all,” she says unimpressed, “I mean, Christ, the same house?!”
As with some Star Wars fans being happiest when Luke Skywalker is still wielding green lightsabers to cut down faceless goons on The Mandalorian, or Rey is staring down Emperor Palpatine on not-a-Death Star, Sid (and the filmmakers) are mocking their fanboy killers in Scream, and perhaps their audience, for wanting to see variations on the same thing again, and again, ad infinitum.
Of course this isn’t only a Star Wars thing. More than three million Game of Thrones fans signed a change.org petition demanding HBO remake the final season of Game of Thrones with writers who aren’t “woefully incompetent”—even while seemingly unable to realize that until an intentionally bitter, unhappy, and admittedly rushed ending, much of what fans loved and quoted from the previous seven seasons of Game of Thrones was written, adapted, and sometimes outright invented by the showrunners who were now being proverbially left to bleed out on the floor.
