Reshoots for Scream 4! Does That Mean It's Bad?

New shooting can be an early sign that a movie isn't worth your money. But not always, as might be the case with the onscreen reunion of Courteney Cox and David Arquette

By Leslie Gornstein Feb 03, 2011 2:28 PMTags
ScreamDimension Films

I hear Scream 4 is headed into reshoots. That means a movie is bad or in trouble, right?
—January, via the inbox

You haven't even caught a glimpse of Ghostface, and you're already spooked by this film. Nice.

For what it's worth, director Wes Craven says we're only looking at a couple of scenes—not exactly a total overhaul of a picture, or an automatic sign of major suckage.

Here's what else I can tell you about the big onscreen reunion of Courteney Cox and David Arquette...

...starting with more from Craven.

According to EW, the new shooting does involve principal talent, including Community's Alison Brie and Aimee Teegarden of Friday Night Lights. However, Craven refuses to call the work "reshoots."

"We had a couple test screenings and we saw two scenes where they had moments you could add to and we just saw a spectacular opportunity," Craven told EW. "Bob [Weinstein] just said to me basically, 'You go to your dark side and I'll give you the money!' [Laughs] The two scenes were really good, but we saw how they could be spectacular, so we thought, let's just go for it."

So is Craven telling the truth? Probably, producers and directors tell me.

It's a myth that reshoots automatically mean that a project is bad.

Sure, Clash of the Titans went through reshoots to add more scenes, and those scenes did not help. Then again, there also have been reshoots for the final installment of the Harry Potter series, and that movie is so sacred that nobody will ever, ever, let it be bad. (According to reports, bad makeup jobs were behind the decision to do more shooting.)

Need more evidence in favor of Craven?

Of course you do. I spoke with a producer named Jason Hewitt, who directed the upcoming Blood Out with Val Kilmer and AnnaLynne McCord, and whose Mickey Rourke flick The Courier is planning to do some reshoots soon.

"They're minor reshoots," he told me, "picking up insert shots of a phone ringing, transition shots that weren't captured earlier."

Not exactly the sign of anything evil to come.

"Reshoots often have nothing to do with whether a film is a disaster," Hewitt says. "A lot of time it's just filling in the spaces to have a complete story."

True, says Lane Shefter Bishop, who coproduced the upcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Weapon.

"Sometimes [a director] may fall in love with a shot and then realize it doesn't cut to anything else," she tells me.

But it doesn't end there. Here's a blind item for you, courtesy of Bishop.

"I recall one time, I was working in connection with a big Disney movie," she tells me. "The director was a big A-list director. The studio liked the cut, but the director wanted to do reshoots to adjust an arc for a character. He even offered to pay his own money to do it."

So. Does this mean that Scream 4 is awful, or not? Wait, why am I even asking? It's Scream 4!