A24 Is Making an SCP Foundation Movie, but the SCP Foundation Says Nobody Ever Called

A24 has built a reputation over the past few years for turning internet-born horror phenomena into genuine box office events, with ‘Backrooms’ earlier this year proving just how much appetite exists for adapting online mythology to the big screen. That success appears to have inspired the studio’s latest genre gamble, one built around another sprawling piece of collaborative internet fiction.

That project, ‘V/H/S: SCP,’ was announced back in July as the ninth installment in the long-running found-footage anthology franchise, produced through a partnership between A24, Spooky Pictures, and Image Nation Studios. The film will adapt the SCP Foundation, a fan-created mythology built around a fictional secret organization that catalogs and contains anomalous objects and entities, framing its found-footage segments as recovered field documentation gathered by the organization itself.

Now, though, the actual SCP community is pushing back on how this adaptation has been handled. The SCP Foundation Wiki issued a statement making clear that despite reports that the deal grants A24 worldwide rights to the film, the site’s own team says it has never been contacted by the filmmakers, producers, or distributors involved in the project.

That disconnect stems from a fairly significant legal wrinkle. The SCP Foundation Wiki operates entirely under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, meaning anyone can legally create derivative works based on its content, commercially or otherwise, as long as they follow the license’s specific terms.

Those terms come with real limitations for A24’s planned release. According to the Foundation, “we have not had any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for this project, despite our best efforts,” the SCP Foundation explained in its statement, going on to clarify that A24 cannot establish any kind of exclusivity over the material regardless of what rights arrangements have been reported.

Practically speaking, that means A24 can distribute the film through theaters and streaming, but it cannot apply DRM or other technological restrictions designed to prevent copying, and it cannot stop anyone else from freely redistributing the finished film once it’s released, exactly as fans have already done with countless SCP-inspired games, short films, and web series over the years. The Foundation even noted it would expect to see the movie posted on YouTube by its premiere date, if not sooner.

Behind the scenes, the project brings together serious genre pedigree, with Spooky Pictures co-founders Roy Lee and Steven Schneider producing alongside Josh Goldbloom and Michael Schreiber, veterans of multiple previous ‘V/H/S’ entries. Lee’s credits include ‘The Ring,’ ‘It,’ and this year’s ‘Weapons,’ while Schneider has backed franchises like ‘Paranormal Activity’ and ‘Insidious,’ giving the project real horror industry weight regardless of the current licensing dispute.

This kind of friction isn’t entirely new territory for A24, either. The studio’s own ‘Backrooms’ success was built on adapting a similarly open, internet-native mythology, and ‘V/H/S: SCP’ appears to be following that same playbook of mining collaborative online fiction for franchise material, even as the underlying community frameworks weren’t necessarily built with major studio distribution deals in mind.

For now, the SCP Foundation has indicated it remains open to sitting down with A24 and the film’s producers to work out a release approach that actually follows the license properly, suggesting this standoff could still be resolved before the film’s planned 2027 theatrical debut. Whether that conversation happens before or after the movie reaches audiences, though, remains an open question.

Given how directly this echoes the free-culture spirit that built the SCP Foundation in the first place, it’s a fitting irony that the community’s own license may end up being the thing that keeps this adaptation from becoming a traditional, tightly controlled studio release.

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