YMMV / Scream 2

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Cotton Weary. Was rescuing Sidney from Ghostface solely dependent on the Diane Sawyer interview? Was he actually going to let Ghostface kill her if she didn’t agree or was that just a snarky remark? The DVD commentary even acknowledged that Cotton was pretty much the Wild Card in the climax.
  • Gale's blasé attitude to the first two murders quickly gives way to worry after Cici's. Did playing the role of the reporter allow her to detach herself from the reality of what she had previously experienced, and it became impossible to ignore once it was clear they had a copycat? Or did Cici's death bring about her realization because she was actually at the scene of the crime personally?
  • While Mrs Loomis's taking up the Ghostface mantle is said to be revenge on Sidney for killing her son, Sidney does note that she abandoned him when she discovered her husband's infidelity, and the woman looks momentarily guilty. Does she indeed feel guilty for leaving her son, and leading to him being killed, and is her following in his footsteps her way of trying to atone for that?
• Base-Breaking Character: Some fans find Lois and Murphy annoying and irrelevant, while others consider them decently comedic characters with a nice touch of Red Herring.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Derek's song and dance in the cafeteria ticks all the boxes: it's extremely out of nowhere, tonally inconsistent (as a big goofy song/dance in a college cafeteria during a slasher movie), and it has only tangential impact on the story. It's just a way for Derek to give his Greek letters to Sid, which he presumably could have done in a simpler, less jarring way. The best justification is that it can be seen as confirmation of his innocence and not being like Billy, and as a romantic gesture that makes his death and Mickey turning out to be Ghostface (given how he was encouraging Derek and clapping along to the song) more impactful.
• Catharsis Factor: Both Mrs. Loomis and Mickey's deaths.
• Contested Sequel: For some, this is an Even Better Sequel, while others feel it suffers from Sequelitis. Notably, the critic score on Rotten Tomatoes is 82% (beating the originals' 79%), but the audience score is a divisive 57%.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Cici Cooper for being a Nice Girl who has some fun interactions with Randy and Mickey and an excellent chase/death scene. Being played by the beloved Sarah Michelle Gellar certainly helps, and it's not hard to find people who wish she'd been around for more than just two scenes.
  • Joel is well-liked for having a boatload of funny lines and being smart enough to get the hell out of dodge when things start to get real serious.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: CinemaSins rightfully points out that the "happy ending" of Sidney surviving yet again and walking off across campus to a peppy song on the soundtrack is tarnished by the fact everyone she was friends with in the first and second films are all dead, plus all the people that died by proxy simply for being associated with her or even in just the same general vicinity. She's all alone. The only people she has left in her life are Dewey, Gale, and Cotton, of whom only the first can be considered an actual friend. That said, Scream 3 reveals Sidney has become a paranoid recluse thanks to all the trauma, acknowledging the hollow victory of Scream 2's ending. It's not until the fourth film that she's properly begun healing.
• Even Better Sequel: Some fans and critics consider this film even better than the first. Retrospective reviews have praised the film for having sharper writing, more developed characters, and more style and suspense than the first film.
• Fandom Rivalry: An inter-franchise rivalry with fans of Scream 4 over which sequel is better. Both sides tend to agree that both films are superior to Scream 3, though.
• Fanon: One of the unnamed students in the film class scene is played by Joshua Jackson. After Scream (2022) featured archive footage of an episode of Dawson's Creek, in which Jackson appears, fans began joking that this character wasn't just played by Joshua Jackson, he actually was Joshua Jackson, who would go on to have more or less the same career as he did in real life.
• Franchise Original Sin: Pulled off twice:
  • This movie has the killer have a secret relationship to a previous character that is the source of their motivation, with Debbie Salt actually being Mrs. Loomis. In this movie, it is foreshadowed that Debbie Salt already at least knows the main cast and that the killer is Billy Loomis' mother. The viewers just don't connect the two till after The Reveal. Plus, the previous movie established the existence of Billy's mother. Scream 3 would try this with Roman Bridger with far less success as almost the entire explanation of his backstory would be relegated to the third movie. The most connection we would end up receiving was an explanation for Maureen Prescott's promiscuous behavior, which had been established in the first movie.
  • It is explained that Mrs. Loomis went through a lot of trouble keeping her true identity disguised. The first movie heavily implies she had not been heard from since leaving Billy, making it plausible that the media never knew what she looked like aside from pictures from before the killings. While in her disguise as Debbie Salt, she takes precautions to not run into anyone who could identify her unless she was dressed as Ghostface. When she is revealed as Ghostface, both Sidney and Gale express shock that it is her, pointing out she lost a considerable amount of weight and had cosmetic surgery which is why she blended in so well. Scream VI never explains how nobody already knew the established characters were related to Richie despite the fact Gale heavily investigated the case for her book. Adding onto this is that in The New '20s, it's flat-out inconceivable the identity of Richie's family, especially his father, would be unknown to the public with how mainstream social media has become unless Richie had changed his last name and erased anything that could link him back to his family should he get caught.
• Friendly Fandoms: With fans of Scream 4. They argue over which film is better, but they generally agree that both films are superior to Scream 3.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The reveal that Billy's mother is the killer was a nod to Mrs. Voorhees in the original Friday the 13th. Laurie Metcalf, who plays Mrs. Loomis, is most famous for her role in the sitcom Roseanne, where her mother was played by Estelle Parsons. Parsons was the original choice to play Mrs. Voorhees before she dropped out and was replaced by Betsy Palmer.
  • The clip from Stab with Sidney (Tori Spelling) and Billy (Luke Wilson) talking in the halls in which the foreshadowing of Billy's motivation being Sidney's mother having an affair with his father and thus causing his mother to leave — while claiming he accepted it — is present. It doubles as foreshadowing that his mother is the killer this time around too!
• Ham and Cheese: Laurie Metcalf and Timothy Olyphant bring the ham that is needed when revealing themselves as Ghostface.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The opening sequence can be uncomfortable to watch after the July 20, 2012 theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado that killed twelve people and wounded dozens more. Just like in the film, the audience first thought it was All Part of the Show.
  • The character Cici is killed by being tossed off a balcony. This would not be the last time we saw a Sarah Michelle Gellar character die by falling from a great height.
  • Derek being strung up by his fraternity brothers is just portrayed as Wacky Fratboy Hijinx in the movie proper. But after the revelation come the late 00s of how a lot of fraternity and sorority "hazing rituals" are really more like low-grade torture and how several pledges have died partaking in them, it casts a much more gruesome pall over this incident. A closer look at the symbols and letters on Derek makes it seem more like his frat brothers didn't just write on him in red marker but perhaps even cut them into his skin with a knife.
  • In his monologue, Mickey claims that he can get away with murder just by blaming the movies at his trial, a plan that both Sidney and Mickey's partner, Mrs. Loomis, dismiss as a bunch of nonsense. Years later, certain defendants would successfully use a similar defense by blaming The Matrix movies for their crimes.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The character played by Sarah Michelle Gellar has a sorority sister named Dawnie. Flash forward several years later, and another Dawnie appears in Sarah's life.
  • Timothy Olyphant and Laurie Metcalf, who both play the Big Bad Duumvirate of this film, would each later appear in an Academy Award-winning computer-animated film that features fellow actor Ned Beatty as the Big Bad (Metcalf voice-acted in Toy Story 3 in 2010, while a year later in 2011, Olyphant voice-acted in a cameo appearance as a Clint Eastwood Expy in Rango). The two are also reunited in the film Stop-Loss, though they don't share any scenes together, where Laurie is again grieving for her dead son. Also, both Olyphant and Metcalf would later play an antagonist just like their characters here for the protagonist played by Bruce Willis, with Olyphant in Live Free or Die Hard (which notably featured music by Marco Beltrami, who also did music for this film) and Metcalf in the stage adaptation of Misery.
  • Mickey and Randy, along with the film class, having a debate about whether or not sequels are any good, with Randy believing in Sequelitis and Mickey eventually trumping him with The Godfather Part II. Years after Scream 2, which didn't fall to Sequelitis, a glut of sequels to anything and everything were made by Hollywood, with a handful of them not falling to Sequelitis, and some, such as Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Toy Story 2 and 3 (which the latter two featured Laurie Metcalf, who played Debbie Salt in this film), are widely considered superior to the first. During the same debate, Aliens is mentioned, which is coincidental as Mickey's actor Timothy Olyphant would join the Alien FX on Hulu series.
  • It is revealed that Ghostface recorded the victims on camera before killing them. In Scream 4, this concept is revisited by the new Ghostface, who records the murders of the victims and uploads the videos to the Internet to take advantage of the now popular found footage genre. Sounds like Mickey and Mrs. Loomis were ahead of their time.
  • During the Motive Rant Mrs. Loomis insists "I was a good mother!" Laurie Metcalf's most remembered role of the 2010s is Lady Bird playing an abusive mother the narrative frames as simply being complicated, for which Metcalf was nominated for an Academy Award. This notably and retroactively makes Mrs. Loomis the only Ghostface to be played by an Oscar nominee.
  • Another one from the Motive Rant. Mickey plans on blaming violent movies for making him a killer, not because it's true but because he wants to guarantee a sensational trial and Fame Through Infamy. In Scream: Resurrection, the killer Beth actually does, in all seriousness, say that her love of violent horror movies molded her into a sociopath.
  • In an early script, Hallie was supposed to be the killer as a commentary on the horror genre's lack of racial diversity. Scream: Resurrection, a television spin-off, would finally feature a black character played by Tyga as Ghostface.
  • Considering Liev Schreiber's later typecasting as villains and psychos, it's hilarious that Cotton Weary is suspected of being the killer but ends up saving the day. And original plans had him becoming a killer!
  • This would not be only time Laurie Metcalf would play a psychopath, as in 2015, a stage adaptation of Misery, starring Metcalf as Annie Wilkes, premiered on Broadway, closing in early 2016.
  • Marisol Nichols had a minor role in this film as a sorority sister named Dawnie. She would later go on to star in Riverdale alongside Scream alumnus Skeet Ulrich. And just like in Scream, Riverdale also had stories revolving around masked serial killers.
  • The character Dawnie only has one scene with Cici (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Three years later, Buffy the Vampire Slayer introduced a character named Dawn who was the titular character's sister.
  • Timothy Olyphant's character is called "the freaky Tarantino film student" by Randy. Olyphant would later be directed by Quentin Tarantino himself in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, twenty-two years after the release of this film.
  • This would not be the only time Timothy Olyphant would play a hammy, Ax-Crazy, Laughably Evil Psycho for Hire who is also The Dragon, who even manages to briefly outlive his boss at the climax before dying too shortly afterwards, except this time it's for a kids-and-family audience, rather than the horror film adult audience that this sequel is directed at.
  • Rebecca Gayheart's role as a Red Herring college student in this movie is much funnier after Urban Legend made Gayheart's college character the actual killer.
• Informed Wrongness: Dewey gives Gale a hard time for being at the scene of Cici's murder, when she's a reporter whose job is to be there, and she's far from the only reporter there. She has more of a reason to be there than he does, considering he's a cop in another town.
• Love to Hate: Mickey. He may be The Dragon, but like the previous one he's also Laughably Evil.
• Memetic Psychopath: It is often joked that sorority girls Lois and Murphy should have been the killers.
• Moral Event Horizon: If his killings weren’t bad enough, Mickey leaps over the line by making Sidney doubt Derek, then killing him in front of her.
• Narm:
  • David Arquette's performance includes him making a lot of weird wide-eyed expressions and delivering his lines like a cartoon mad scientist. He also gives Dewey a limp that's meant to represent the nerve damage he suffered in the first film, but just looks ridiculous, especially when he's running after Ghostface.
  • Jada Pinkett's... operatic death in the opening. Hilariously spoofed in the first Scary Movie.
• Narm Charm:
  • Her death cry though, along with Ghostface’s ominous Leitmotif after the final stab, are just so chillingly awesome that they save the scene.
  • The scene from Sidney's dress rehearsal for Cassandra is a bit too out there for the movie's tone, but it's still pretty creepy and effective.
• One-Scene Wonder:
  • Luke Wilson in the Film Within a Film playing Billy. His impression of Skeet Ulrich is magnificent.
  • Maureen Evans, due to being a Deadpan Snarker, and one of the few characters not to be a fan of the Stab movies.
  • Cool Teacher Gus Gold, who oversees the memorable Cassandra dress rehearsal and encourages Sidney not to let fear dominate her while making a good joke in the process. Being played by the perennially awesome David Warner helps.
  • During the film class, the teacher, Those Two Guys who debate with Randy about Sequelitis, and (to a lesser extent) the girl who knew Maureen and is depressed about her death are all unnamed and only appear in that one scene, but they're pretty well-acted and particularly memorable characters.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Portia de Rossi has one of her first appearances here. She would get her breakout role on Ally McBeal just one year later, and become more famous for being married to Ellen DeGeneres.
  • Dawnie, the sorority sister who leaves Cici alone with the killer, is played by Marisol Nichols; who would later be better known for 24 and playing Hermione Lodge in Riverdale.
  • Omar Epps as the first victim would later be best known for House.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The killer's Motive Rant satirizes the era's Moral Guardians and the controversy over violence in the media, which was already brewing at the time even before the Columbine massacre, and name-drops Bob Dole, the Christian Coalition, and various members of O. J. Simpson's legal team, such that even the other killer, Mrs. Loomis, explicitly refers to this motive as a product of the '90s.
• The Woobie:
  • Maureen and Phil, especially Maureen. They're just two innocent college students trying to watch a film in the theater and Ghostface brutally kills them both. In Maureen's case, she gets attacked while believing her boyfriend is behind the mask, then tries to ask for help, but the entire crowd of moviegoers wrongly assume that it's all a publicity stunt ''and cheer as she's bleeding to death. As if it's not enough, the only reason Ghostface attacked them is their names — Maureen has the same name as Maureen Prescott, and Phil's surname is Stevens (one of Ghostface's past victims was Steven "Steve" Orth).
  • Cici Cooper is likewise targeted simply for having the same name as a previous Woodsboro victim, and she's a Nice Girl implied to have a Bastard Boyfriend. Ghostface slowly tortures her over the phone the same way he did to Casey, and she gets left alone in the house while being on call just in case one of her sisters needs a ride home. She gets numerous Hope Spots but is killed anyway. Sidney even says "that poor girl".
  • Derek. He's desperately trying to be a loving boyfriend yet Sidney keeps pushing him away due to her trauma from Billy's betrayal. This doubt ultimately gets him killed, spending his final moments assuring her that he really loved her and never would have hurt her.

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