Neon seems to be thumbing its nose at its biggest rival A24 by planning a competing horror film based on the online universe of writing called the SCP Foundation. But unlike A24’s recently announced project, Neon’s Wednesday announcement boasted that it has both the input of the SCP Foundation’s community of writers and will be compliant with a Creative Commons license all the writing is protected under — an approach A24’s movie does not appear to be embracing.
Last week, IndieWire reported about the pushback toward an A24 horror movie in the “V/H/S” universe that was meant to be inspired by the SCP Foundation. Though the film seems to be another in the “Backrooms” vein of drawing from online source material without a clear owner, the admins behind the SCP Foundation Wiki page where all the writing is hosted said otherwise.
Their work is covered under a Creative Commons license, specifically a CC BY-SA 3.0, and in a statement they claimed A24 or the producers never contacted them and cannot make a commercial film unless it adheres to the terms of the license, which involve making the work freely shareable and released online at the same time it hits theaters. That generally would be a non-starter for a for-profit distributor.
But Neon is undeterred, and says it will develop and produce a feature film based on the SCP Foundation that will meet the Creative Commons license guidelines and the SCP Wiki team’s mission.
The distributor is vowing to make the film a “open-source horror project.” While it didn’t specify what that would entail in terms of how it will be released specifically, SCP Wiki’s prior statement demanded that any film not contain DRM technology that prevent it from being freely copied by others or other theaters and that anyone would be able to freely make derivative works based on the film. Neon even went a step further and said the movie would be an anthology film based on the SCP Foundation, which is exactly what the “V/H/S” franchise has been.
If Neon were to go through with such a film, it’s hard to see today how it becomes a money-maker, but it could represent a revolutionary approach toward distribution that would make any movie available to the public in a way that it could evolve over time.
Neon did not announce any specific talent attached to the project or any producers involved at this stage, but it said it would focus on emerging filmmakers and will release the film theatrically in 2027.
SCP Foundation Wiki in a statement to IndieWire was enthusiastic about the new project and said it was “satisfied” with Neon’s plans to adhere to the Creative Commons license, though it cannot in its capacity endorse any project as an “official” adaptation. The Wiki staff also clarified that the admins specifically are not directly involved with the writing or production of the film, they’re not getting paid on behalf of it, and it will not impact any other authors on the site to do their own adaptations or additional writing.
“The staff of the SCP Foundation Wiki and our community appreciate NEON’s excellent
communication and commitment to following the requirements of our license as well as the
spirit of collaboration at the core of the SCP Foundation project,” SCP Wiki wrote in a statement.
SCP Foundation was created in 2008 and the Wiki on which all the writing is housed is a community-driven, collaborative, speculative fiction website about the exploits of a secret organization called the SCP Foundation, one that “secures, contains, and protects” anomalous or supernatural items and entities to protect humanity as well as the anomalies themselves. Over a span of nearly 20 years and thousands of different writers, the writing has not been contained to a single, cohesive canon, but everything is at least centered around this organization investigating supernatural anomalies from everyday items.
What sets SCP Foundation apart from Backrooms, as IndieWire previously explained, is that SCP Foundation has always been released under the Creative Commons license and centralized to this website, whereas Backrooms has sprawled across 4chan and Reddit and beyond, and A24’s “Backrooms” film was specifically based on Kane Parsons’ YouTube series IP.
Neon, of course, has its own strong track record with emerging horror talent, having birthed the career of Osgood Perkins and more recently shepherding “It Ends” director Alex Ullom along with his next film “4 x 4: The Event.” It also has another Perkins movie, “The Young People,” and David Robert Mitchell’s “They Follow” in the works.
