Neon vs. A24: The SCP Foundation Movie Showdown
Two of the buzziest names in elevated horror are suddenly racing for the same piece of internet folklore. Neon has announced its own SCP Foundation anthology film — and it's doing something A24's competing project reportedly never bothered with: actually talking to the people who built the thing.
What Neon Announced
Neon — the distributor behind Longlegs, Cuckoo, and The Monkey — is developing a horror anthology built around the SCP Foundation, the sprawling collaborative fiction wiki that's been growing since 2008. The site now catalogs more than 10,400 "anomalies" and over 6,300 volunteer-written stories, from SCP-173 (the concrete statue that only moves when you blink) to SCP-682 (the near-indestructible reptile that mutates its way out of every containment attempt).
Neon's version is pitched as an anthology platform for emerging filmmakers, targeting a 2027 release. No directors, segments, or title have been announced yet. What has been nailed down is the legal framework — and that's the part turning heads.
The Catch: Everything SCP Touches Must Stay Free
The SCP Foundation isn't owned by a studio or a single author. Every entry on the wiki is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license, which means any derivative work has to carry that same license forward. No exclusivity. No locking the material behind a single distributor. In theory, anyone could legally re-upload Neon's finished anthology to YouTube the day it hits theaters.
Neon reportedly reached out to the SCP Wiki's admin team ahead of its announcement and committed to honoring that license. The Foundation's staff responded with a public thank-you, while being careful to clarify the obvious: there's no official endorsement, no compensation changing hands, and no staff members involved in production. It's a handshake, not a partnership — but it's a handshake A24 apparently skipped.
Where A24 Got Tangled Up
A24's competing project, announced as V/H/S: SCP on September 11 with worldwide theatrical rights and producers Roy Lee and Steven Schneider's Spooky Pictures alongside Image Nation Studios, is also aiming for 2027. The problem, according to the SCP Foundation itself: nobody from that production ever reached out.
That's a real issue under CC BY-SA, which the Foundation maintains doesn't allow for exclusive theatrical rights to begin with — you can adapt the material, but you can't fence it off. Locking a derivative work behind a single theatrical release runs against the entire point of a share-alike license built by thousands of unpaid contributors who expect their work to stay freely remixable.
Why This Fight Actually Matters
It's easy to read this as just another "two studios chasing the same IP" story, but the SCP situation is a genuinely unusual test case: a horror property with no central rights-holder, built by a community that can and will call out a studio publicly for cutting corners. Neon came out looking like it did its homework. A24 is now stuck explaining why it didn't.
For horror fans, the upside is simple — two different anthology takes on one of the internet's richest shared horror universes, built by two studios with sharp genre instincts, both landing around the same year. However the licensing dispute shakes out, SCP's jump from forum lore to multiplex screen says a lot about where studios are mining ideas these days: straight from the communities that built them.
Stream More Horror on Screamify
Visit www.screamify.com for nonstop horror entertainment.
Screamify features over 300 horror movies, from found footage classics to modern genre favorites. We are also producing original horror films, with micro horror content launching in 2026.
