10 Horror Movie Characters Given Last Minute Deaths
2. Jill Roberts - Scream 4
Like just about every movie in the series, Scream 4 went through tricky creative straits before it was completed, with franchise scribe Kevin Williamson having his original script rewritten extensively by Ehren Kruger, who wrote Scream 3, during production.
Much differed between Kruger's revised script and earlier iterations of Williamson's script, including a reworked finale.
The film originally ended at Kirby's (Hayden Panettiere) house, with Sidney's (Neve Campbell) niece and Ghostface killer Jill (Emma Roberts) being loaded into an ambulance and gleefully getting photographed by the press as she does so.
Just then, a paramedic would announce that a woman inside the house had survived, ending the film on a cliffhanger where either Sidney or Kirby was still alive, while Jill would become the first Ghostface killer to survive into a sequel.
Instead, rewrites resulted in the new hospital finale being created, where Jill is eventually exposed as the killer and killed by Sidney.
As fascinating as it would've been to see a Scream movie end on a cliffhanger, given Scream 4's underwhelming box office performance it was probably for the best that this wasn't the case.