How Scream 4 Should Have Ended (And What Came Next)

2. The Changes...

Scream 4’s final act mirrors the final act of Scream 1, with the remaining teenagers carousing and watching scary movies at a house party. Ghostface picks off members of the party one by one until Sydney is the sole survivor and then the killers reveal their identities to her, tell her their motives and how they plan to get away with it. That’s how all three films in the series ended...

Except Scream 4 doesn’t end there. Instead there is a second climax in which Sydney, Gale, and Dewey face off against Jill, the surviving killer, in the hospital. This is a second, tacked-on climax that left many hardcore fans of the series scratching their heads.

It turns out the fans were 100 percent right to think something was wrong here. This entire hospital sequence was added after Williamson was fired from the film. This second climax served to solidify that Sydney survived and conquered Ghostface yet again. But this was not how it was originally supposed to go down.

Williamson’s script ended with Sheriff Dewey and first responders arriving at the scene of the bloodbath. Dewey stands over Sydney’s body and laments the sobering reality that he was not able to get there in time to save her, and the scream queen has finally been bested by Ghostface. Next, Dewey would find Sydney’s cousin, Jill, still alive and presume that she was the one to defeat the killers this time.

Williamson’s script did end with an ambiguous line, of a paramedic yelling into Dewey to tell him that one of the bloodied victims still had a pulse. The screenplay did not make it clear whether that victim hanging on by a thread would have been Sydney or one of the teenagers (perhaps it could have been fan favorite Kirby?).

So what would have come next?