Two Studios Are Making SCP Foundation Movies. Only One Started With the License

Neon announced on September 30 that it is developing a feature-length anthology based on the SCP Foundation, the enormous collaborative horror universe built online by thousands of writers. The movie is targeting a theatrical release in 2027, will spotlight emerging filmmakers, and — this is the important bit — Neon says both the film and related materials will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license used by the SCP project itself.

Which would already make this an unusually interesting horror announcement.

Except A24 announced an SCP Foundation movie first.

Earlier in September, A24 joined Spooky Pictures and Image Nation Studios on V/H/S: SCP, a feature-length extension of the found-footage anthology franchise also intended for theaters in 2027. Initial reporting described A24 as holding worldwide rights to the project. Soon afterward, however, the actual people running the SCP Wiki issued a fairly important clarification: nobody involved with the film had contacted them, and nobody can own exclusive rights to the SCP Foundation in the conventional Hollywood sense.

This is where the case file gets weird.

The SCP Foundation isn't a normal piece of intellectual property with a studio, novelist or corporate rights holder waiting at the top of the chain. Its stories, anomalies, characters and concepts exist under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. People are allowed to create commercial derivative works from SCP material, but derivative works must follow the license's conditions as well.

According to the SCP Wiki's licensing statement, that means an SCP-derived movie released under those terms couldn't simply be locked away as a conventional exclusive studio asset. The Wiki specifically says a compliant derivative can't use technological restrictions that prevent copying, and that the license doesn't allow a studio to stop somebody else from making another SCP adaptation.

In other words: the answer to "Which studio has the movie rights to SCP?" is basically the wrong question.

Neon appears to understand that.

The studio says it contacted the SCP Foundation team before announcing its project and intends to release the movie under CC BY-SA. The SCP Wiki team, while making clear that Neon isn't producing an "official" SCP movie and that the Wiki isn't endorsing it, publicly praised the company's communication and commitment to the license.

And this is important: none of this means A24 is prohibited from making V/H/S: SCP. The SCP Wiki itself says filmmakers do not require its permission or participation to create an adaptation. Its issue is compliance with the license, not whether Hollywood is allowed through the front door.

So unless something changes, 2027 could give us two completely separate theatrical SCP movies.

That's funny, but it's also weirdly perfect.

SCP became SCP precisely because there was never one person standing at the gate declaring a single version canonical and everyone else unauthorized. Somebody wrote an impossible object. Somebody else wrote an organization trying to contain it. Thousands more people arrived and started adding monsters, personnel files, incidents, alternate realities and increasingly elaborate disasters to the pile.

Now Hollywood has arrived, looked at that sprawling collaborative monster and done the most SCP thing imaginable:

it duplicated itself.

The larger question is whether Neon can turn the openness of SCP into part of the movie rather than treating it as an irritating licensing condition. An anthology built around emerging filmmakers already sounds closer to the way the Wiki itself functions than a conventional franchise adaptation does. Different voices. Different anomalies. Shared framework. Nobody gets to permanently lock the containment chamber.

There are still enormous unknowns. Neon hasn't announced filmmakers, stories, cast or specific SCP entries. We don't know whether its film will adapt existing material or primarily create new anomalies inside the universe. And A24's project is still developing separately.

But suddenly the race to make the first major SCP movie isn't really about who controls SCP.

Nobody does.

That's kind of the whole point.