Sure, our collective crush on O.G. Ghostface killer Billy Loomis has haunted us for decades (he was cute for a murderer, okay?), but does Scream star Skeet Ulrich think there should be even more hauntings in the horror film franchise? It turns out no, even though he played the ghost of Billy in the last two movies.
The 54-year-old actor revived his Scream legacy character for sequels films including 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI, despite having very much been killed alongside his buddy Stu Macher by Sidney Prescott in the 1996 original movie. In the recent films, Billy Loomis shows up as hallucinations seen by his daughter Sam Carpenter (played by Melissa Barrera), but Ulrich doesn’t think that future installments of the slasher series will delve any deeper into the supernatural. He told ComicBook.com:
I don’t think so. I think what has made it such a success — and when I do signing conventions throughout the year, the fan base is rabid, rabid, rabid, I’ve never seen anything like it — and I think what they’re into is that it could be their neighbor. You don’t know. But I think if you take it outside of what is possible and plausible in most people’s minds, you lose a lot of that core audience, so I don’t know if that’s necessarily a direction they could get away with. They can get away with a lot, but I don’t know about that one.
Though the upcoming Scream 7 will see the return of Ulrich’s former onscreen girlfriend Neve Campbell — whose horror icon Sidney Prescott was sorely missing from last year’s Scream VI — it’s unlikely that Skeet will reprise the role of Billy Loomis once again. Especially now that Barrera’s Sam Carpenter won’t be involved in the story.
Barrera was controversially fired from the Scream franchise last fall due to comments she made on social media regarding Gaza; her co-star Jenna Ortega, who played Sam’s half-sister Tara Carpenter, also left the project shortly after. So unless Sidney herself starts having hallucinations of her murderous ex, we think Ulrich’s ghostly plot line has been put to rest.
That’s not to say there’s not a franchise future in Billy Loomis’ better half, Stu Macher. Devotees of the beloved horror movies have been dying for Matthew Lillard to return as the wise-crackling, stab-happy sidekick, and Ulrich is seemingly in the same camp. The actor previously revealed that he’d also like to see Lillard’s Stu come back but unlike his own Scream storyline, he believes it will only work if it turns out that Macher has actually been alive this whole time and isn’t merely a ghoulish memory from the Woodsboro killings.
As of now, Scream 7 doesn’t currently have a release date but while we wait for an update from the studio, bookmark CinemaBlend’s 2024 movie schedule so you don’t miss a thing. In the meantime, you can see Skeeth Ulrich as Billy Loomis in the original Scream, which is available to stream with a Max subscription, and in 2022’s Scream and 2023’s Scream VI, which are both streaming on Paramount+. Ulrich will also star in the upcoming AMC crime series Parish, which debuts on March 31.