I remember it like it was yesterday. The best character in the Scream franchise was stolen from us too soon all for a little 1997 shock value.
Scream 2 screenwriter Kevin Williamson — who also wrote I Know What You Did Last Summer and created The Vampire Diaries and Dawson's Creek (yeah, seriously) — recently admitted the slasher franchise could've been very different.
For the 25th anniversary of Scream 2, Williamson told Entertainment Weekly he regrets killing Jamie Kennedy's character, Randy.
“I thought if you kill someone really important to the audience in the middle, it just ups the stakes," he said.
According to Williamson, he had no choice but to kill Randy. “Everything’s off the table. I knew we weren’t going to kill Sidney, I knew we weren’t going to kill Gale or Dewey. Those three characters, for Scream 2, were safe, and so I had to look to the secondary characters.”
He added, “I love Randy. I would have given him a much bigger life had I known this franchise was going to live and live. I would have loved for him to be a legacy character."
"At the time, I thought it would just be the punch in the gut the audience needed at that time, to really get mad, and get mad at the killer," he said.
The thing is, I'm sure if Randy survived Scream 2, he wouldn't have lasted much longer. The only person from the original cast returning to the next movie is Courteney Cox. Neve Campbell, unfortunately, exited the franchise after salary disputes.
The next installment, Scream 6, will take place in New York City and features Wednesday star Jenna Ortega, Samara Weaving, and Dermot Mulroney, with Cox and Hayden Panettiere reprising their roles from previous films.
It's never too late to bring Randy back. All the cool franchises are doing it nowadays.
