Earlier this month, we scooped A24’s acquisition of an SCP Foundation movie from Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios, intended to bring one of the internet’s largest fan-built horror and sci-fi universes to the big screen for the first time.
The announcement ruffled feathers, precipitating a unique form of drama. Within hours, we heard from a group known as the SCP Foundation Wiki Licensing Team, which expressed concerns about the possibility of the studio claiming exclusive rights to a project based on community-generated IP with very specific licensing requirements.
Now, Neon has countered A24 with an SCP Foundation project that is expressly taking the group’s concerns into account. Development on this project was in motion before the A24 announcement, we’re told.
Created in 2008, the SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website revolving around the SCP Foundation, a secretive organization that secures and contains anomalous or supernatural items and entities to protect humanity as well as the anomalies themselves. Over its nearly two decades of existence and with thousands of contributors, the site has built an engaged, global fanbase and has inspired short films, web series and games.
Acknowledging the communal roots of the project, Neon is approaching its SCP Foundation movie as an “open-source horror project” slated for release in theaters against A24’s next year. Who specifically will contribute to Neon’s version, and which will make it to theaters first, is not yet clear.
Neon expressed its commitment to releasing its film and related materials under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA, meaning that they will not permanently control the film. Other creators will be able to copy, share, screen, build on or adapt the film — even commercially — under the Creative Commons license, provided that they credit the SCP creators and filmmakers, release their own adaptations under the same license, and avoid claims to an exclusive distribution arrangement.
Neon has been in communication the SCP Wiki team to ensure the film’s distribution does not deviate from their mission and licensing guidelines.
News of the rival SCP Foundation movie comes following production wrap on 4 X 4: The Event, rising genre filmmaker Alex Ullom’s second horror film for Neon on the heels of this summer’s It Ends. Other recent and upcoming in-house productions include Osgood Perkins’ The Young People; David Robert Mitchell’s They Follow; Matt Johnson’s The Vice Guide; and Arie and Chuko Esiri’s Clarissa.
Coming off the release of Na Hong-jin’s Cannes monster flick Hope, Neon’s slate for the rest of the year includes fellow awards candidates like Fjord, Paper Tiger, Artificial and A Place in Hell, among other titles.
