Neon to Build SCP Foundation Anthology Film for 2027 Release

Neon is developing an anthology film based on The SCP Foundation, the community-driven horror forum born online in 2008. The project, slated for release in 2027, will focus on platforming emerging filmmakers.

The SCP Wiki is a collaborative speculative fiction website where users submit written works expanding the lore of the SCP Foundation — a secret organization that collects and studies supernatural and often highly dangerous objects and entities for the good of humanity. Among its most popular entries are SCP-173, a concrete statue that attacks anyone who breaks eye contact, and SCP-682, a supremely intelligent reptile able to adapt to any environment and rapidly heal any injury.

Neon made a point of emphasizing in its release that it will release the film under the Creative Commons license CC BY-SA, and that it has been in communication with the SCP Wiki team about adapting its works. That detail carries weight. The announcement comes after the SCP Wiki team publicly denounced a rival film project from A24, Spooky Pictures and Image Nation shortly after it was unveiled.

"We have not had any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for this project, despite our best efforts, and to the best of our knowledge they have not made any efforts to contact us," the SCP team wrote in its statement. "Furthermore, A24 does not and cannot have any exclusive rights to anything related to the SCP Foundation, including any films that Spooky Pictures or anyone else may choose to create."

The licensing dispute goes to the heart of what the SCP Foundation is. Because the wiki's thousands of entries were written collaboratively and shared under Creative Commons terms, no single studio can lock down exclusive screen rights to the property. Neon's decision to work within the CC BY-SA license and open a dialogue with the wiki's moderators positions its anthology as the adaptation made with the community rather than around it.

The timing also reflects how thoroughly internet-born IP has changed its standing in Hollywood. Internet IP went from pariah to pay dirt after the success of A24's "Backrooms," based on the web series by 21-year-old Kane Parsons, who wrote and directed the film. The horror-thriller grossed $400 million against a $10 million budget.

That outcome triggered a land rush. Warner Bros. scooped up film rights for Trevor Henderson's viral horror creation Siren Head, attaching Brian Duffield as director and Zach Cregger as writer. Weeks later, TriStar Pictures acquired another of Henderson's creatures, Cartoon Cat, for a movie adaptation.

Neon's anthology model — multiple emerging filmmakers adapting separate entries from a seventeen-year-old collaborative archive — offers a structural answer to the licensing puzzle that sank goodwill around the A24 project. Whether the SCP community embraces the result will likely shape how studios approach open-licensed horror IP when the film arrives in 2027.