Movies
‘Scream’ Writer Kevin Williamson and Miramax Partner to Develop Genre Films
Visions of ’90s horror are dancing in our heads.
You could say that Kevin Williamson (along with Wes Craven, of course) redefined the horror genre in the late ’90s, penning the game-changing Scream and following it up with I Know What You Did Last Summer; for better or worse, that one-two punch ushered in a wave of teen slasher films in the late ’90s and early 2000s.
Williamson subsequently wrote Scream 2, The Faculty and Scream 4, and he’s mostly been playing around on the small screen in more recent years. But Williamson is set to make his return to the genre film arena, as Deadline reports tonight that Miramax has signed Williamson to a new first-look deal to develop “elevated genre film content.”
“I’m thrilled to be partnering with Bill Block and to be back in the feature space working with new filmmakers in the genre I love so much,” said Williamson.
The deal reflects Miramax’s desire to reinvigorate their genre slate. Needless to say, Williamson has a history of doing precisely that within the genre space.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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