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A24 has boarded V/H/S: SCP, taking worldwide theatrical rights and setting the film for 2027. Deadline broke the news on Friday. It also makes this the first entry in the fourteen-year-old franchise mounted as a real theatrical release. The 2012 original went out through Magnolia in a limited run day-and-date with VOD, and every installment since has lived on Shudder — so a 2027 wide release from A24 is a different order of ambition entirely.
And it puts A24 back in a corner of the genre where the studio has already made a great deal of money.
The project itself is not new. Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios announced it in July, and we wrote then about why the pairing makes so much sense — a franchise about tapes nobody should have kept, dropped into a fictional archive about evidence somebody chose to file instead of destroy. What changed this week is the distributor, the scale, and a licensing question nobody has answered yet.
Why A24 Wants Internet Lore
Because it worked once already. A24’s Backrooms, adapted from a creepypasta that started as a single unsettling photograph, grossed roughly $394 million worldwide, and Kane Parsons is returning to direct the sequel. The producers are not being coy about the parallel.
Internet lore is quickly rising as a compelling source of new stories for the horror genre, bringing with it built-in, highly devoted audiences.
Joint statement from Image Nation Studios CEO Ben Ross and Spooky Pictures co-founders Roy Lee and Steven Schneider
Roy Lee and Steven Schneider produce for Spooky Pictures alongside Josh Goldbloom and Michael Schreiber. Ross, Rami Yasin, Jakob Pollack and Brad Miska executive produce — Miska being the Bloody Disgusting co-founder who has had a hand in the V/H/S films since the original.
The License Underneath the Deal
Here is the wrinkle, and it is a strange one. The SCP Foundation is not a rights holder in the ordinary sense. It is a collaborative fiction wiki whose thousands of entries are published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. ShareAlike is the load-bearing word: derivative works have to carry the same license forward.
In a statement posted to the SCP Wiki, the site’s staff and authors said they were not consulted before the announcement and had tried to reach the filmmakers without success. Their reading of their own license is blunt.
A24 does not and cannot have any exclusive rights to anything related to the SCP Foundation.
Statement from the staff and authors of the SCP Foundation Wiki
The practical version of that argument, per the same statement: a compliant SCP film would have to be distributed without digital rights management and without exclusivity, which in the Foundation’s telling means anyone could upload it to YouTube and any streamer could carry it without paying for the privilege. The Foundation also said it remains open to talking about bringing the project into compliance.
None of that has been tested, and it is worth being precise about what is and is not established. This is the Foundation’s position on its own license, not a ruling. Neither A24 nor the producers have publicly responded, and nobody outside the deal knows what the film will actually adapt — an anthology could be built on original anomalies in the SCP style without lifting any individual community-authored entry.
What Is Already on the Calendar
Before any of this reaches a screen, the franchise has a nearer stop: V/H/S/Mixtape, the music-themed ninth chapter with segments from RZA, Flying Lotus and Ernest Dickerson, premieres on Shudder on October 9. V/H/S: SCP is targeting theaters in 2027, with a cast, segment directors and a firm date all still to come.