Scream VI’s latest meta twist: justifying the whole Scream franchise

polygon.com:

Scream VI feels like a confident turning point for a long-running self-referential slasher series, though what that series is becoming remains tantalizingly unclear. For close to a quarter-century, the Scream sequels were playing defense. Director Wes Craven and writer Kevin Williamson had a back-to-back one-two punch with the success of the first two movies, but Scream 3 was delayed and met middling reactions from the fans. Eleven years later, with Scream 4, Craven and Williamson tried to wrap their heads around a new generation thirsting for social-media notoriety, and those younger audiences didn’t seem to care much.

Another 11 years after that, 2022’s newly rechristened Scream addressed the proliferation of legacy sequels in the horror genre and beyond. It was a hit with audiences and critics, which meant the inevitable sequel, 2023’s Scream VI, is the first genuinely fast-tracked Scream since Scream 2 was rushed to theaters. Suddenly, Scream is an A-list horror series again. Or in the corporate parlance winkingly applied in Scream VI, it’s now a franchise, a never-ending cycle of fan service subject to its own set of rules and conventions.

But when Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), niece of the early films’ dearly departed movie geek Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy), holds court to deliver a hyper-nerdy treatise on the rules of franchises, the material isn’t as rich as her explanation of “requels” (or legacy sequels) from the previous movie. Her vague guidelines for franchises — particularly the idea that new franchise entries must go bigger to top the previous films — aren’t that different from the sequel rules Randy laid out back in Scream 2.

This being a Scream movie, it’s possible that this rehash of the 1997 movie is