It's been 25 years since Scream 2 hit the big screen, and in a retrospective, writer Kevin Williamson revealed he still had one regret about the movie. Williamson, who wrote the first two Scream movies alongside Scream 4, and who also served as executive producer on the series from Scream 2 onwards, revealed that he regrets killing off fan favorite character Randy Meeks (Jamie Kennedy).
Scream 2 continued the series' characteristic satirizing of the horror genre. This time, the horror movie decided to subvert the final girl trope by following Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) to college, where she's terrorized by a new Ghostface. Her friend and fellow Woodsboro survivor Randy is also along for the ride. Unlike many horror movie sequels which choose to kill off the final girl from the first film, however, Sidney survives the events of the sequel, while Randy is killed halfway through the movie.
In a retrospective interview conducted by EW, Williamson recalls his writing process for Scream 2. Williamson leaked a fake script for Scream 2 in order to throw people off the trail of what the sequel would be about: Scream 2 was out less than a year after the first one, so interest was sky-high. He also said he regretted killing off Randy:
"I thought if you kill someone really important to the audience in the middle, it just ups the stakes. Everything's off the table. I knew we weren't going to kill Sydney [sic], I knew we weren't going to kill Gale or Dewey. Those three characters, for Scream 2 , were safe, and so I had to look to the secondary characters. I love Randy, I would have given him a much bigger life had I known this franchise was going to live and live. I would have loved for him to be a legacy character. At the time, I thought it would just be the punch in the gut the audience needed at that time, to really get mad, and get mad at the killer."
Williamson's words also reveal that he never intended to kill off the uncharacteristically smart horror protagonist, Sidney. That makes sense on multiple levels: Scream has always skewered the conventions of slashers, and killing off the final girl from the first film is a slasher film staple. Usually, it's the slashers themselves that become iconic, but in this case, Sidney herself has become an icon, while Ghostface is always a different person (or people).
Sidney's also a slasher victim without being an obnoxious character. Her character's defining trait is that she's a survivor no matter what. Though that wasn't as well-defined for the franchise during Scream 2, it becomes readily apparent when rewatching the series.
Randy, however, might not have been the best person to kill off so early into the franchise. Had Williamson known that the series would have continued past Scream 2, perhaps he'd have written things differently - Scream 3 does feature a cameo from the character. In a slasher whodunnit, however, main characters frequently get killed off. If Randy hadn't been killed, who knows who else might have been killed off?
Source: EW