After Melissa Barerra’s Firing, Jenna Ortega is Also Not Appearing in ‘Scream VII’ – But It’s Not What You Think
It looks like Scream 7 will be auditioning for new leads soon.
That’s according to Deadline, which reported Wednesday that Jenna Ortega, who played Tara Carpenter in the last two Scream movies, will not be returning for Scream VII. This comes just a day after Spyglass Media Group dropped Melissa Barrera, who played Tara’s sister Sam, from the cast of the upcoming film.
Though Melissa Barerra was dropped for social media posts that Spyglass Media said violated their policy against “antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form,” Ortega’s issue has to do with scheduling.
Deadline says that the Scream VII script isn’t ready yet, and Ortega is due in Ireland next April to shoot he second season of Wednesday for Netflix. That shoot is scheduled to go until summer, and Ortega is slated to spend a few more days on the set of the Beetlejuice reboot, which had been delayed due to the SAG-AFTRA strike.
Yesterday, Spyglass issued a statement in response to Barerra being dropped. The company said, “Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”
Barerra’s Instagram posts in support of the Palestinian people did reference both genocide and ethnic cleansing.
Christopher Landon, who is taking over as director on Scream 7, put up a post on Twitter (X) that was subsequently removed. It read: “This is my statement: Everything sucks. Stop yelling. This was not my decision to make.”