The inclusion of the legacy characters in “Scream 5” — and the writers’ obligation to give them all something meaningful to do — also inevitably led to the rest of the new characters being shortchanged. Mindy and Chad, two characters who’d become part of the Core Four in the next film, only had a handful of minutes of screentime between them. The original “Scream” had time to flesh out Sidney’s group of friends so that their deaths and killer reveals would have a real impact; Scream 5 didn’t. Randy, Billy, Stu, and Tatum were constant presences throughout the original, whereas in Scream 5, long stretches of time flew by where we didn’t see any of Tara’s friends at all.
This is likely why “Scream 6” seems so hesitant to kill off any of the Core Four: considering we’ve barely gotten to know most of them in the first film, it would be a little premature to kill them off here. This isn’t like “Scream 2” where characters like Dewey, Gale, and Randy were all well-established from the start; “Scream 6” understands that Tara, Chad, and Mindy were all shortchanged in their debut film, and it wants to make up for all that lost time. A Randy-style killing of one of the survivors from Scream 5 wouldn’t have worked here, because it’s only after this latest film that the non-Sam members of the Core Four have developed the same sort of familiarity with audiences that Randy had.
In other words, “Scream 6” is the series making up for all the extra time it had to spend on the legacy characters in “Scream 5.” Here, the only legacy character to deal with is Gale, and she already fits in organically with the New York setting.
