Somehow, Matthew Lillard Is Returning For SCREAM 7

Will the casting announcements ever end?
Matthew Lillard as Stu Macher in SCREAM (Credit: Miramax)
Matthew Lillard as Stu Macher in SCREAM (Credit: Miramax)

Last Updated on February 3, 2025 by Angel Melanson

Because Scream 7 clearly doesnโ€™t know when to quit, Deadline has just revealed the biggest casting announcement yet: that Matthew Lillard, who played one of the original Ghostface killers in Wes Cravenโ€™s original meta slasher, will be returning for the upcoming film despite having had a television dropped on his head nearly thirty years ago. 

Like just about every new cast member joining the legacy sequel (with the exception of Joel McHale, apparently), we have no idea who Lillard is playing or how heโ€™ll be involved in the film, whether as his original character or a new one. Plot details for the film are also being kept under wraps, though we do know that the sequel has begun filming, according to franchise director Kevin Williamson.

It seems likely that, with the announcement earlier today of Scott Foley also joining the cast, some kind of dream sequence or hallucination might be at play in the upcoming legacy sequel, with a fan theory suggesting that returning scream queen Sidney Prescott might be hallucinating killers from her past with the emergence of a new Ghostface. Whether thatโ€™s true remains to be seen, but after much speculation that Stu might somehow return despite his grisly death, it wouldnโ€™t be surprising if Spyglass resurrected the killer for another cash cow in a long stream of them, given the franchiseโ€™s extended success. 

What we do know is that plenty of key cast members from the franchise will be returning for Scream 7, notably Neve Campbell and Courteney Cox, with the former returning after being absent from Scream VI, but also Mason Gooding and Jasmine Savoy-Brown, who featured in the last two โ€œlegacy sequelโ€ films in the franchise as twins. Scream 7 is also set to star Ghostbusters: Afterlife stars Celeste Oโ€™Connor and Mckenna Grace, as well as Anna Camp and Isabel May. 

Scream 7 is the third sequel in the โ€œrebootedโ€ era of the franchise, following 2022โ€™s Scream and Scream VI in 2023, the latter of which raked in a franchise-high gross at the domestic box office, earning over $108 million. The series doesnโ€™t look like itโ€™s headed for graveyard anytime soon, though, as the release of Scream 7 looks set to push the franchise past the $1 billion mark at the global box office. 

Scream 7 hits theaters on February 27, 2026.