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You know who's scary? The Weinsteins.

Kim Hollis: Scream 4 opened to $18.7 million versus a $40 million production budget. This represents the worst opening since the original, and it will almost certainly wind up with the lowest total for the franchise to date. Do you consider this to be a good enough result? Do you expect Dimension Films to move ahead with their stated plans to make Scream 5 and 6?

Tim Briody: Yes, I'm not really surprised at the result here. The audiences who lapped up Screams 1-3 have long since moved on. Now, it's about the gorno (see: Saw; hey look what I did there) or the just plain freaking scary (see: Paranormal Activity) and the Dead Teenager Movie/The Killer Is One Of Us type of flicks aren't what they used to be. As I stated in the Friday Box Office column, I hope they view it as a reboot (even if it was a storyline continuation) where a bit of box office is sacrificed in order to build the audience back up for the next installment. I don't see a reason for them to not go ahead with Screams 5 and 6.





Josh Spiegel: I think that Dimension may go forward with another Scream film, but it's come to a point where they need to lower the budget. Scream 4 is a lot of things, but it doesn't appeal to younger audiences, because younger audiences don't know or care about the franchise. Teenagers snarking about pop culture is old hat, and the gore in these movies are nowhere near that of the Saw franchise. Honestly, considering the crowd I saw the movie with on Friday night (biggest theater in the multiplex, with over 400 seats, and there may have been...oh, 60 people there), I'm shocked it made this much. Dimension may have made this movie, but they didn't seem to market it much, despite spending too much on it. They might press their luck with a fifth or sixth film.

Bruce Hall: It actually had not occurred to me that the last entry in this franchise was back in 2000. I'm not sure how Scream 4 came to be, but I can tell you that this is a franchise whose target audience was all embryos when the first installment came out in 1996. Just how relevant did they expect it to be? The funniest thing about this to me is that the Scream franchise was originally intended in part to satirize the horror genre. The problem is that you can only goof on something so many times before the volume of your output implies that you wish to be taken seriously. And once that happens, YOU become the joke. As far as I am concerned, the minute you sequelize a satire the fun stops and you become subject to the same criticism you're trying to dish out. Not to mention, this is a franchise that initially borrowed heat from people like Neve Campbell and Jamie Kennedy; people whose reason for being famous evaporated back when Bill Clinton was president. Will they make more of these? They'll probably try at least once, because to give up now would be to give up on a significant cash cow, and that doesn't happen easily in Hollywood. And I have to admit, Jason, Freddy, Leatherface and Mike Meyers have all been declared dead many times, but one great script is all it takes to turn things around. Time will tell.

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