A24 Faces Legal and Community Backlash Over Upcoming V/H/S: SCP Film

Following the commercial and cultural success of Backrooms, A24 appears to be setting its sights on yet another major internet horror craze, planning a new installment in the long-running V/H/S horror anthology series centered around the SCP Foundation universe. However, the announcement of V/H/S: SCP has been met with immediate and fierce pushback from both the online community that built the mythos and legal experts, leaving the high-profile project on remarkably shaky ground almost as soon as it was unveiled.

For the uninitiated, the SCP Foundation is a massive, sprawling creepypasta phenomenon that, much like the Backrooms, originally sprouted from the anonymous imageboards of 4chan. The fictional SCP—which stands for Special Containment Procedures—Foundation is tasked with documenting, capturing, and securing paranormal, supernatural, and anomalous entities that threaten the normal functioning of reality. The lore is constructed primarily through a vast collaborative wiki featuring clinical, detached documentation that mimics government bureaucratic paperwork. It blends science fiction, cosmic horror, and mundane administrative nightmares, making it an ideal candidate for a monster-of-the-week style cinematic anthology.

Despite the rich potential of the source material, the rollout has already hit major roadblocks regarding community relations. Unlike the Backrooms project, where A24 collaborated directly with Kane Parsons, the creator of a YouTube series that achieved massive popularity within the Backrooms community, the studio behind V/H/S: SCP does not appear to have engaged with the SCP community at all prior to making its plans public.

The SCP Foundation Wiki, which serves as the official digital home for all things related to the collaborative universe, swiftly posted a public statement following the film’s announcement. The statement bluntly read that the community had not experienced any communication with the filmmakers, producers, or distributors for the project despite their best efforts, and to the best of their knowledge, the studio side had made no efforts to contact them.

DrEverettMann, an administrator for the SCP Foundation Wiki, confirmed this disconnect in statements to the press, noting that administrators had made several attempts to reach out to the production team following the project’s announcement, yet they had not received a single response.

This friction goes far beyond mere community goodwill or hurt feelings among fan creators; it touches upon complex, foundational licensing rules that govern the entire SCP project. The SCP Foundation operates entirely under a Creative Commons license, specifically the CC BY-SA 3.0 ShareAlike framework. Under the terms of this specific license, while anyone in the world is technically permitted to distribute or create derivative works based on SCP material, they must also allow anyone else to copy, redistribute, or build further upon those new creations. That strict legal reality makes attempting to monetize a major feature film through traditional studio channels extraordinarily difficult.

A24 is no stranger to controversies surrounding internet-born intellectual property. Following the release of Backrooms, the studio made several severe missteps that heavily alienated fans, most notably by filing copyright claims against independent creators working within the Backrooms universe before ultimately withdrawing them after director Kane Parsons intervened.

Mindful of those past PR disasters, A24 and its partners on the new project—Image Nation Studios and Spooky Pictures—have been eager to clarify that they are not attempting to assert exclusive rights over the entire SCP universe. While A24 itself has declined to comment directly on the developing situation, Monique Levine, a spokesperson representing Image Nation and Spooky Pictures, stated that A24’s worldwide rights pertain strictly to the specific film project currently being produced.

The core problem, however, is that under the exact license utilized by the SCP Foundation since its inception, no entity can legally claim exclusive rights to any SCP material whatsoever. Anna Tumadóttir, the CEO of Creative Commons, explained that while anyone is welcome to use works available under a Creative Commons ShareAlike license—even for commercial purposes—there are strict stipulations attached. Adaptations must be released under the exact same terms as the original material. Furthermore, unless a separate, formal agreement is reached directly with the copyright holders, a studio-produced film like this would theoretically need to be released under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license or a compatible later version, complete with attribution to the original creators and an absolute lack of exclusive distribution rights. Consequently, anyone else would remain entirely free to redistribute, stream, or copy the film under those identical terms.

Legal experts have echoed these warnings regarding the incompatibility of traditional studio business models with Creative Commons frameworks. Paul Szynol, a law professor at the University of Michigan and Villanova, noted that while anyone—including A24, Netflix, independent filmmakers, or casual fans—is technically free to make an SCP film and put it in theaters, the studio would fundamentally lack the legal ability to stop anyone else from making derivative adaptations of its film or freely redistributing it. Szynol pointed out that such an arrangement would constitute an extremely unusual and precarious business model for a major Hollywood studio.

DrEverettMann of the SCP Foundation agreed with that assessment, explaining that while the open license wouldn’t technically prevent the film from being shown in traditional theaters—nor would it prevent theaters from charging regular admission fees—whether it would remain practical to release the film using conventional distribution methods is a much trickier question.

Expanding on the dilemma, Mann noted that the ability of anyone to distribute a CC BY-SA-licensed work means traditional theatrical exclusivity simply cannot apply. It is practically impossible for any entity to hold exclusive rights to a film distributed under a CC BY-SA license, raising serious questions about how many consumers would willingly pay premium prices to see a movie in a theater when they could legally download or stream it at home for free.

This leaves A24 and its production partners facing a narrow set of difficult choices moving forward. The studio could theoretically push ahead with the project as currently planned, ignoring the licensing hurdles and dealing with any resulting legal fallout later. However, as Tumadóttir warned, Creative Commons licenses, including the strict ShareAlike provisions, have been successfully enforced in courts of law around the world whenever necessary. Szynol concurred, warning that in such a scenario, A24’s version of the film would be classified as unauthorized and infringing, effectively spelling the death of the project.

Given these severe legal roadblocks, it appears significantly more likely that A24 and Spooky Pictures may ultimately decide to abandon explicit SCP branding while still drawing loose "inspiration" from the rich source material. It is a creative workaround that other commercial works have successfully utilized in the past, such as the critically acclaimed novel There is No Antimemetics Division written by prominent SCP Foundation contributor QNTM.

Alternatively, the studio could theoretically choose the boldest and least likely path: releasing the movie directly under the ShareAlike license and attempting to recoup its massive production costs even without the safety net of exclusive copyright ownership. As the industry watches closely, A24 must soon decide how to navigate a landscape where internet lore resists traditional Hollywood control.