10 Horror Movie Characters Whose Personalities Suddenly Changed In Sequels

Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber) was a minor but significant character in the original Scream - a man who was imprisoned for the rape and murder of Sidney's (Neve Campbell) mother Maureen.

But at film's end, we learn that Cotton was in fact innocent, and in Scream 2 he has a much larger role as a principal character who ends up saving the day.

The sequel ends with Cotton killing villain Mrs. Loomis (Laurie Metcalf), making peace with Sidney, and seemingly receiving the fame he'd been craving as a wrongly convicted man.

But amid its many other problems, Scream 3 kicks off by introducing us to a Cotton whose subsequent fame and fortune has gone entirely to his head.

In the film's pre-title sequence, Cotton is now an obnoxious celebrity with his own talk show and a clear taste for every last decadent thing Hollywood has to offer.

While fame does of course change people, often for the worse, in Cotton's case he scarcely feels like the same stoic badass from Scream 2, mutated here into a soft, irritating jackass who is rather effortlessly killed by Ghostface at the end of the sequence.

You can argue that Cotton's likeability was obliterated in order to make his death a little less upsetting to fans, but why? Let us feel the pain, rather than reworking him into a grating stereotype.