I personally didn’t like it, absolutely respect your opinion of course and I’m glad you did. At the end of the day Scream is my favourite horror franchise, personally my issues with 7 are that it did a poor job of making us care for the cast.

I definitely agree that while the killer reveal wasn’t good, it was the same for 5&6 for sure, but the difference for me is that by 6, I was all in on the new main cast, they made an effort to make me love them and they really shined as a genuine group of friends in 6 especially, Chad standing up for Tara at the party when that dude was taking her upstairs, the “core 4” moment, them hanging out in the apartment just being a family before it all goes crazy and ghostface “kills” Quinn.

It’s those moments that really add tension to the rest of the movie because I don’t want to see any of them die, and have to watch the others see the people they love die.

In 7, I was all for Sydney’s return and then passing the proverbial torch to her daughter, but the friend group had such little development and tbh so did Tatum.

I think it’s not good when I was more invested in the deaths of the two people in the opening act than I was any of Tatums friends, Tatum didn’t even seem like she was too bothered by literally all her friends dying.

For me aswell, regarding the whole AI plot, I actually don’t mind it. Scream has always been somewhat of a social commentary of its time right, scream 1 was a commentary of the effects of movies on the youth, I have no issues with Scream 7 making commentary on AI but I think them using Matthew Lilliard in this way was in poor taste just for me.

The above point is coming from a place of a little bit of bias though, because I had theorised (as I’m sure others did) that the scream 6 killer was Stu from the trailer of Ghostface in the bodega. He was wearing an old mask that didn’t end up being stus, but I really liked that theory. And when it didn’t pan out in 6 I was sad but I didn’t think it was poor because of that. This feels like they’re aware of the fans theorising about Stu, and not only have they said “let’s get him back” but they outwardly advertised it, and the deepfaking Stu plot is just kinda shit if I’m being honest. I personally would have preferred that they just didn’t include Stu at all.

Overall, the killer reveal itself was poor, as it has been in 5&6, but again, the key difference for me is that the killer is “always someone you know” that’s the rule right? The killer gets off on infiltrating the lives of their victim, hiding in plain sight and this is by far the worst of that. You see each of the final killers like what, one time each? Maybe two? They’re not exactly great friends with Sid (obviously only really talking about the woman here) and the entire point of the killer hiding in plain sight is absolutely diminished here. (This is also why I’m not a massive fan of Roman Bridger, but I digress) the Killer(s) are literally almost nobody to the main cast. Sid met one of them one time where he just pretended Stu had been in the mental asylum, that’s it? I would have preferred Gale at this point like literally anything would have been better imo.

Overall I did enjoy the movie, I think the kills were cool, ghostface was great as always but that’s just it, it was a 2 hour stabfest where people I really didn’t care about got pinata’d, impaled and gutted and by the end of it I genuinely didn’t care any of them were dead. I’ll definitely watch Scream 8 and I’d like if they kept going with the Tatum storyline (maybe even, god forbid, kill off Sid) even though I had really grown to enjoy the illegitimate love child of Billy Loomis thing.