Grammy award-winner and multiple Oscar-nominee Mary J. Blige has boarded the long-delayed third season of MTV’s Scream, the teen horror series based on Wes Craven’s iconic 1996 film.
The series premiered in 2015, fronted by Willa Fitzgerald and Bex Taylor-Klaus, and continued for two seasons before MTV pulled the plug on the original format. A continuing storyline was abandoned in favour of the anthology framework favoured by other horror series like American Horror Story, with the upcoming season three the first to flick the reset switch.
It was originally set to premiere in March this year but legal complications with The Weinstein Company, who served as executive producers, pushed the series back. It is now anticipated to arrive later this year.
Mary J. Blige will play Sherry Elliot, mother to Scream‘s new lead, Deion, played by Power Rangers‘s RJ Cyler. It marks Blige’s first on-screen credit since her Oscar-nominated performance in Dee Rees’s Mudbound.
MTV are clearly working hard on revitalising the series, bringing back the iconic Ghostface mask, casting Teen Wolf‘s Tyler Posey and Scream Queens‘s Keke Palmer in lead roles, and now the acquisition of Mary J. Blige, not a year after her Oscar nominations.
At a guess, we expect season 3 of Scream to air around Halloween, and we’ll keep you abreast of any future developments.