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Neon Announces An Open-Source SCP Foundation Film
SCP squared // Illustration by Kate Walker
Neon announced that it’s making an “open-source” horror anthology film adaptation of the viral internet phenomenon SCP Foundation.
Why It Hits: Riding the YouTube-bred horror wave (which it helped launch with Backrooms), A24 announced it was making an SCP Foundation movie… but that turned out to be news to the SCP community, which builds on the IP via a Creative Commons license. That means no one can exclusively control the rights to the universe, which would typically be a non-starter for any movie studio. But Neon may have found a nifty workaround.
Between The Movies: Neon may be developing a whole new way to make a major motion picture.
The anthology film will “focus on platforming emerging filmmakers.”
The studio will release the movie under a Creative Commons license.
It’s also been in talks with the unofficial gatekeepers of the IP — the SCP Wiki.
Final Credits: Here’s the real kicker — both Neon and A24 plan to release their SCP movies next year, creating this generation’s first instance of dueling movies being made from the same public IP (Snow White has been in this debacle before).
But with Neon seemingly having won over the SCP community, the internet groundswell may already favor its adaptation… meaning A24 might need to land a very buzzy filmmaker to keep interest high in theirs (if it moves forward at all).
The Future: If Neon really does lean into the open-source nature of the SCP Foundation for its film, the studio could make something truly original — the first movie to be continually iterated on in public.
Today’s email was written by David Vendrell.
Edited by Nick Comney. Polled and Copy-edited by Kait Cunniff.
Published by Darline Salazar.