Neon Plans Open-Source SCP Foundation Movie, Unlike A24's

Neon announced on Wednesday that it will develop and produce a feature film based on the SCP Foundation, the community-driven collaborative fiction universe, and that the project will comply with the Creative Commons license protecting all of the writing on the SCP Wiki.

The move positions Neon in direct competition with its rival A24, which recently announced a horror film in the "V/H/S" universe inspired by the SCP Foundation — an approach that has drawn pushback from the administrators of the SCP Foundation Wiki, where the writing is hosted.

Unlike A24's project, Neon said its film will meet the Creative Commons license guidelines and the SCP Wiki team's mission. The distributor is vowing to make the film an "open-source horror project." Neon did not specify what that would entail in terms of release mechanics, but the SCP Wiki's prior statement demanded that any film not contain DRM technology preventing free copying by others or other theaters, and that anyone would be able to freely make derivative works based on the film.

Neon went a step further and said the movie would be an anthology film based on the SCP Foundation — exactly the format of the "V/H/S" franchise.

The dispute over the license is central. The SCP Foundation's writing is covered under CC BY-SA 3.0. In a statement, the wiki admins said A24 or the producers never contacted them and cannot make a commercial film unless it adheres to the terms of the license, which involve making the work freely shareable and released online at the same time it hits theaters. Those terms would generally be a non-starter for a for-profit distributor.

Last week, IndieWire reported on the pushback against the A24 film. Though that project seemed to follow the "Backrooms" vein of drawing from online source material without a clear owner, the admins behind the SCP Foundation Wiki said otherwise — their work has a license and a centralized home.

What sets the SCP Foundation apart from Backrooms, as IndieWire previously explained, is that SCP Foundation writing has always been released under the Creative Commons license and centralized to its website, whereas Backrooms has sprawled across 4chan, Reddit and beyond. A24's "Backrooms" film was specifically based on Kane Parsons' YouTube series IP.

The SCP Foundation was created in 2008. The wiki is a collaborative, speculative fiction website about a secret organization that "secures, contains, and protects" anomalous or supernatural items and entities — protecting humanity as well as the anomalies themselves. Across nearly 20 years and thousands of writers, the writing has never been contained to a single cohesive canon, but everything centers on this organization investigating supernatural anomalies found in everyday items.

In a statement to IndieWire, the SCP Foundation Wiki said it was "satisfied" with Neon's plans to adhere to the Creative Commons license, though it cannot in its capacity endorse any project as an "official" adaptation. Wiki staff also clarified that the admins are not directly involved with the writing or production of the film, are not getting paid on behalf of it, and that the deal will not impact other authors on the site pursuing their own adaptations or additional writing.

"The staff of the SCP Foundation Wiki and our community appreciate NEON's excellent communication and commitment to following the requirements of our license as well as the spirit of collaboration at the core of the SCP Foundation project," SCP Wiki wrote in a statement.

Neon did not announce any specific talent or producers attached at this stage. The company said it would focus on emerging filmmakers and release the film theatrically in 2027.

Neon has its own track record with emerging horror talent. The distributor launched the career of Osgood Perkins and more recently shepherded "It Ends" director Alex Ullom along with his next film, "4 x 4: The Event." It also has another Perkins movie, "The Young People," and David Robert Mitchell's "They Follow" in the works.

If Neon follows through, it is hard to see today how the film becomes a money-maker. But it could represent a revolutionary approach to distribution that would make a movie available to the public in a way that allows it to evolve over time — a test case for whether open-source cinema can survive inside a for-profit industry.