The A24 SCP Foundation V/H/S movie backlash, explained: the studio bought "worldwide rights" to something no one can own
There is something deeply, cosmically funny about a studio announcing it has secured exclusive rights to a fictional universe whose entire premise is "some things cannot be contained." A24, the tastemaker factory that turned liminal hallways into a nearly $400 million hit with Backrooms, boarded V/H/S: SCP on Friday.
The trades dutifully reported the studio had taken "worldwide rights" to the project, planned as the found-footage franchise's first real theatrical release since 2012, with Spooky Pictures and Image Nation producing and a 2027 date on the calendar. One tiny problem: the SCP Foundation, per the people who actually built it, is not a thing you can buy.
A quick primer for the uninitiated
The SCP Foundation is an 18-years-running collaborative fiction project — thousands of writers on a wiki, cataloguing fictional anomalies in deadpan clinical prose, from unkillable reptiles to a sentient vending machine. It has spawned games, videos, podcasts, and an entire generation's sleep problems. And every word of it lives under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, which is the load-bearing wall of the whole enterprise: anyone can use it, adapt it, even sell it — but whatever you make has to carry the same open license.
So when the announcement dropped, the wiki's staff and authors put out a statement that reads like a very polite containment breach report. They confirmed, as they told The A.V. Club, that:
"We have not had any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for this project"
— despite trying to reach the production themselves before the news broke. Their bigger point: A24 "does not and cannot" hold exclusive rights to anything SCP. Under the ShareAlike terms, the community argues, a compliant SCP film would have to go out DRM-free and without exclusive distribution — meaning, in the maximalist reading, anyone could legally upload the finished movie to YouTube on opening weekend. Blockbuster economics meet copyleft. Someone get the executives a cold compress.
A24 would like everyone to calm down
The studio, to its credit, responded fast instead of lawyering up in silence. A spokesperson told Kotaku that the "worldwide rights" language covers the next V/H/S film specifically, and that the project is:
"not a claim of exclusivity over the SCP Foundation universe or its concepts"
— a tribute to the community, in their telling, not a land grab. Which is nice! It is also not the same thing as answering the actual question, which is how a theatrical, presumably DRM'd, presumably exclusive studio release squares with a license that forbids all three. Nobody has tested this in court. Nobody seems eager to be first.
William Friedkin Despised This 10%-Rated Horror Sequel So Much He Called It An "Abomination"
Why everyone's watching this one
Because this is the fight the whole creepypasta gold rush has been building toward:
- Backrooms worked because the underlying shorts had an actual owner to pay.
- The Siren Head movie works because artist Trevor Henderson holds a normal, boring copyright.
- SCP is the first target with no owner at all — just twenty thousand co-authors and a license with teeth.
The wiki, for what it's worth, says it would still love to sit down with A24 and figure out a compliant release. Personally, I hope they do, because a major studio negotiating distribution terms with an anonymous internet horror collective is the best possible timeline. Secure. Contain. Promote.
Previously we wrote: Most Acrophobic Thriller Got a Sequel – It Doesn't Hit the Same Heights, but Still Worth the Climb
