Matthew Lillard thought nobody would see Scream, so he planned to become a telly star instead
Matthew Lillard spent the dawn after a Scream night shoot covered in fake blood, deciding the film was rubbish and his future was on the telly. The pilot never aired. The slasher is seven films
Matthew Lillard spent the dawn after a Scream night shoot covered in fake blood, deciding the film was rubbish and his future was on the telly. The pilot never aired. The slasher is seven films deep.
Matthew Lillard wrote off Scream before the blood had dried. At Ghostface Forever, the film's 30th-anniversary panel at New York Comic Con on 9 October 2026, he sat next to Skeet Ulrich and Jamie Kennedy and described the exact moment he decided Wes Craven's slasher was going nowhere.
"I was in the back of a car, driving home from work one night, at like six in the morning, covered in blood… This movie's lame. Nobody's gonna see it. I'm going to go become a television star."
— Matthew Lillard, at New York Comic Con
He wasn't plotting alone. The cast had been comparing notes on what came next: Courteney Cox was heading back to Friends, Neve Campbell to Party of Five. Lillard had, in his words, "literally just been on a pilot". Two co-stars with hit series and one with a fresh pilot under his belt. The maths looked fine.
The career plan, 1996 edition
To be fair to 26-year-old Lillard, the evidence was on his side. Horror was in the gutter after a decade of numbered sequels, and Craven's name wasn't selling tickets: his last release was the Eddie Murphy flop Vampire in Brooklyn. As one commenter in the Reddit thread on the story put it: "In 1996 it makes sense. Horror was dead."
Then Scream opened in December 1996 and did this:
- Budget: about $15 million.
- Worldwide gross: around $173 million, and one of the year's surprise hits.
- Franchise: seven films so far. Scream 7 opened on 27 February 2026 with $64.1 million in the US, the series record, and Paramount says it has since passed $200 million worldwide.
- The pilot: "that pilot never went," Lillard said. None of the coverage even names it.
So the television career went the way of most pilots. The "lame" film turned into the one Lillard is still being asked about at Comic Con three decades on.
He bet on the telly. The telly lost.
Not that he did badly out of the bet. Scream led to She's All That and Scooby-Doo, and much later to Five Nights at Freddy's.
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Stu Macher, 30 years on
Lillard played Stu Macher, one half of the original Ghostface double act with Ulrich's Billy Loomis: the giggling, hopelessly suggestible one. Fans have been quoting him for 30 years, and the thread proved they haven't stopped. "Peer pressure. I'm far too sensitive" is the line people still say "in real life when people ask 'why did you do that?'", according to one commenter. The top comment riffed on Stu's own finale wail about his mum and dad: "His parents are gonna be so mad at him."
The franchise hasn't let go of him either. Scream 7 spent a good chunk of its running time hinting that Stu survived the 1996 finale, before revealing that the killers had been using AI deepfakes of him on video calls. Lillard has since said a post-credits scene confirming Stu was alive was shot and then cut after test audiences didn't warm to it. Thirty years on, a studio is still debating whether the man is dead. That's more than most pilots get.
Lillard's own verdict on the panel was that "nobody could have possibly ever imagined" what Scream would become. Fair enough. Though Friends finished in 2004 and Party of Five in 2000, and Cox and Campbell were both back in Scream 7, so even the colleagues with the proper TV jobs ended up returning to the film he thought nobody would see.