Neve Campbell’s Net Worth Includes Her Original ‘Scream’ Salary—Here’s What She Made Then Vs. Now

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Scream queen. Over 25 years after becoming a global sensation thanks to Scream, Neve Campbell’s net worth has continued to thrive. But her salary over the years for each of the Scream movies might surprise you.

Long before starring in Scream, Campbell—whose full name is Neve Adrianne Campbell—was born in October 1973 in Guelph, Ontario. She grew up in the Canadian town alongside her three brothers Christian, Alex and Damian. Her mother Marnie was a yoga instructor and psychologist from Amsterdam, while her father Gerry immigrated from Glasgow, Scotland to Canada to teach high school drama classes. While Campbell’s parents divorced when she was only two years old, she was still inspired by the pair’s creative pursuits. In fact, Campbell came from a long line of performers: Her maternal grandparents owned a theater company in the Netherlands, whereas her grandparents on her father’s side were also actors.

When she was six years old, Campbell witnessed a performance of The Nutcracker that would change her life. The budding performer enrolled at the Erinvale School of Dance to study ballet after the performance, before eventually transferring to the National Ballet School of Canada, where she trained and performed in productions of The Nutcracker and Sleeping Beauty. But after suffering a series of dance-related injuries, Campbell decided to make another career-defining move at the age of 15, when she turned to acting instead. She went on to study theatre at the John F. Ross Collegiate Vocational Institute in Guelph, where she starred in local productions of The Phantom of the Opera.

In the early ‘90s, Campbell began branching out to film and television. Her on-screen debut came in 1991 after working on a Coca-Cola commercial. Later that year, Campbell landed an uncredited guest appearance on the show My Secret Identity. The following year, she appeared as Laura Capelli in an episode of The Kids in the Hall before landing her first lead role as Daisy in the Canadian drama series Catwalk. She later appeared as a guest on several Canadian TV series, including 1994’s Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

After landing a number of roles in Canada, Campbell relocated to the United States to make her big break. In 1994, she landed the role of orphaned teen Julia Salinger on the Fox drama series Party of Five, which aired until 2000. She emerged from the series as a teen idol, earning a Teen Choice Awards nomination for Choice TV actress and a Golden Globe Award alongside her cast for Best Drama in 1996. While on the show, Campbell also landed her first feature film role in the supernatural blockbuster, The Craft, which premiered in 1996.

But Campbell’s biggest role to date has to be her role as Sidney Prescott in Wes Craven’s Scream. The film—which remains the highest-grossing slasher film in decades—launched an entire franchise starring Campbell and other original cast members such as Courteney Cox and David Arquette in a series of sequel films, including 1997’s Scream 2, 2000’s Scream 3, 2011’s Scream 4 and 2022’s Scream, otherwise informally known as Scream 5. For her role in the film series, Campbell has earned a number of awards—not to mention, a hefty boost to her net worth.

So, what is Neve Campbell’s net worth today? For everything we know about how much Neve Campbell has earned from her role in the Scream franchise and more, just keep on reading below.

How much did Neve Campbell earn from Scream?

Neve Campbell has starred as scream queen Sidney Prescott in every installment of the Scream franchise to date—and she has earned a pretty penny while doing so.

When Scream premiered in 1996, the film was an instant financial and critical triumph. The first film in the series generated over $173 million at the global box office, making it the highest-grossing slasher film until the release of Halloween in 2018. In 1997, Campbell reprised her role in Scream 2, which grossed over $170 million at the box office. Scream 3, by comparison, made slightly less when it premiered in 2000. The film brought in over $160 million and marked a temporary end to the saga until the franchise’s return over a decade later with 2011’s Scream 4. The fourth film in the Scream franchise earned over $97 million at the box office. According to TheRichest, Campbell’s take-home pay from the first film in the franchise ended up being around $1.5 million. Meanwhile, she reportedly earned a salary bump to $3.5 million for Scream 2 and $4 million for Scream 3.

After four Scream films, Campbell told Entertainment Weekly in 2016 that she would be open to reprising her role once more, but the decision would be “a tough one” following the loss of the franchise’s director, Wes Craven, who died in 2015.

“Wes was so responsible for the success of it and the brilliance of it, and he was a dear, dear friend and a mentor, and I just don’t know how I would feel at the moment if it came around again,” she told the publication at the time. “It would have to be something really special and really different. They’d have to be really convincing about who they decided to bring on as director, and I’d still have to do a bit of soul-searching on that one.”

Five years later, Campbell’s casting as Sidney Prescott was confirmed for the fifth Scream film, directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett and planned for release in January 2022. While she was first hesitant to participate after Craven’s death, she was eventually persuaded. “The new directors came to me with this beautiful letter saying that they’ve become directors and love film because of these films, and because of Wes, and they really want to be true to his story and his journey with these films, so I was really happy to hear that,” she told Variety in 2020.

Though Neve Campbell’s Scream 5 salary has yet to be publicly reported, we’d wager to say that she’s earning a significant paycheck based on the massive box office earnings and salaries from the previous four films in the Scream franchise to date.

What is Neve Campbell’s net worth?

According to Celebrity Net Worth, Neve Campbell’s net worth is $10 million as of 2022. This accounts for Campbell’s salaries from each of the Scream franchise films, including her $1.5 million, $3.5 million and $4 million paychecks from Scream, Scream 2 and Scream 3, respectively. While Campbell’s salary for Scream 4 and Scream 5 are unknown, it’s clear that the trajectory of her earnings is only going up from here.

Scream 5 premieres in theaters on January 14, 2022. You can get tickets here for your local showings. Plus, here’s how to watch the Scream movies in order for free.

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Neve Campbell talks ’emotional’ shoot for new ‘Scream’: ‘It all came flooding back’

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The new Scream movie may be the fifth entry in the horror franchise but shooting the film was no ordinary experience for series mainstays Neve Campbell, Courteney Cox, and David Arquette. In addition to the production beginning after the start of the COVID outbreak, this latest Scream is the first not to be made by Wes Craven, with Ready or Not directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett taking over from the late Master of Horror, who passed away in 2015.

Campbell describes stepping on the set of the 2022 Scream as, “Emotional, to be honest. Because I certainly felt Wes’s absence, and at the same time, I clearly felt his presence. Every time I walk on these movies I feel his presence, and his power, and his input, and his influence, and everything he did to make these movies amazing. Also, I don’t think it’s a giveaway to say that we do return to the original house, so to walk onto that set. It blew my mind because the set decorators did an incredible job; it’s identical. It was petty surreal, at the time 24 years later, to walk into that house. I think Courteney, David, and I each individually had a good cry when we walked onto that set. I mean, these movies meant a lot. The very first experience was so much fun and meant so much to all of us in many ways. So, yeah, everything came flooding back.”

Below, Campbell talks more about the making of the new Scream, where we find her character Sidney Prescott this time around, and the future of the franchise.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When you finished Scream 4, did you think, “This is the last time I’ll be playing Sidney Prescott?”

NEVE CAMPBELL: Yes and no. Yes, in the sense of, I don’t know whether we’ll do that again, I’m not sure audiences will be interested again, maybe that is the last one, but at the same time, we seem to keep making them! So you never know. [Laughs]

What did you think when you read the script for the new film (by James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick)?

I thought it was really good. I thought it was tight. I thought it was funny again and scary again. I had wondered, but we had Kevin (Williamson, who wrote the first Scream) on board overseeing it as an exec, and he certainly had something to say about the script, and everyone was very open to the old cast giving our opinions and our thoughts on our characters because we’ve spent the most amount of time with them. It was a good process for all of us.

Neve Campbell (“Sidney Prescott”), left, and Courteney Cox (“Gale Weathers”) star in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream.” Scream (2022) | Credit: PARAMOUNT PICTURES

These films are whodunnits. No spoilers, but as you were reading the script, did you correctly guess who was indeed doing it this time around?

No. [Laughs] Which is always a good thing.

Do you keep in contact with Courteney and David in the time between Scream films? Are you on a WhatsApp group?

No. [Laughs] No, not all the time because we have our lives and our kids and our families. But we do check-in. And then, especially when we hear they’re about to start [making a new Scream film], we start texting each other, and gabbing about the potential of it, and what that means and how we feel about it, and it’s always lovely to get back in touch.

I don’t want to compare playing Sidney to putting on a comfy pair of slippers, but is it easy for you to find the character at this point?

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I know Sidney. I’ve spent enough time with her and in her slippers [laughs] to know what her voice is, and who she is physically, and where she’s at. And in this film, she’s a mother, which is a whole other level for her of fierceness and purpose, so it was nice to see Sidney in a place where she is content in her life and not living in fear. And then, of course, chaos happens! [Laughs]

What was it like working with the new directors?

They were delightful. So excited, like giddy boys. I think it was Matt who said the first time I did a scene with them, “I was so excited to be watching another Scream movie, I actually forgot I was directing it.” [Laughs] I guess he was watching Sidney and he was excited to see Sidney. You know, they had written to me prior to my signing on to the film to tell me that they are directors because of Wes Craven, and that they made Ready or Not because of the Scream films, and that they really wanted to honor Wes’s legacy and do right by him, and that meant a great deal. I think they’ve done an incredible job, and I think they’ve elevated certain things in their own way as well. There’s just no ego, which is lovely. They’re such a pleasure to work with.

Neve Campbell (“Sidney Prescott”) stars in Paramount Pictures and Spyglass Media Group’s “Scream.” Neve Campbell in ‘Scream’ (2022) | Credit: PARAMOUNT PICTURES

You were shooting after the start of the COVID outbreak but before vaccines were available, which now seems insane.

I know. That was a weird experience, I have to say. I, as an actor, tend to put my chair at the monitor with the directors and the writers because I really like that process. I like to see what we’re about to shoot, and I like to see how things are being shot, and I like to see how tight we are, and what energy we need and have discussions [about] what they’re going for. And because of COVID, I wasn’t allowed to do that; I had to sit in another room. So that was disappointing in a sense because I wasn’t able to be a part of it in that way. Also, I did an entire movie without seeing any of our crew’s faces, and that’s weird. And also, you rehearse with a mask on, and so when the cameras are rolling, it’s actually the first time that you see what another actor’s going to do. Which in a sense, is good because it’s fresh, but it’s just a different way of working.

What did you think when you saw the finished film?

I was really, really happy and really excited and relieved, to be honest. [Laughs] I had a sense that it was going to be good, and I knew how much the directors were excited to make it, and I know how good the script is, and I knew the actors were doing a good job, but you still never know, right? So I was very excited.

Do you think they’ll keep on making Scream movies?

I think they’d like to. I think they would very much like to. I think that was the intent with this. So let’s see how it does.

The cast of the new Scream also includes Marley Shelton, Kyle Gallner, Mason Gooding, Mikey Madison, Dylan Minnette, Jenna Ortega, Jasmin Savoy Brown, Sonia Ammar, Jack Quaid, and Melissa Barrera. The movie opens in cinemas Jan. 14.

Watch the trailer for Scream below.

Pick up a copy of Entertainment Weekly’s Ultimate Guide to Scream, available online or wherever magazines are sold.

Scream’s Neve Campbell purchased $2.8million LA home 14 years after fleeing city

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Scream fans will likely be delighted to see Neve Campbell, 48, back on the big screen alongside Courteney Cox, but we’re curious about her time off-screen.

LOOK: Inside Katie Couric’s huge $6.3million Hamptons home she designed with sister Clara

The House of Cards actress – who was formerly married to Jeff Colt from 1995 to 1998 and John Light from 2007 to 2011 – lives in the San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles with her partner JJ Feild and their son Caspian. Although Neve is notoriously private when it comes to her home in Sherman Oaks, Dirt reported that she bought it for $2.8million in 2020.

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WATCH: Scream 5 official trailer

The purchase may have come as a surprise to her fans, since she previously lived in LA but fled to Islington, London in 2007. “I had security because of a stalker, which was horrible,” she told The Guardian in 2016, adding: “I was sitting in LA getting sad. I lived there for 13 years and I never felt at home. LA is very isolating. It’s not a walking city and it’s not a very cultured city. In London I got culture, that’s for sure.”

MORE: America’s most expensive home hits the market for $295million – and it’s twice the size of the White House

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The Scream actress lives with her partner JJ and son Caspian

Her new LA house boasts two buildings – one on the street level with a garage and space for a studio, and a two-story house up the hill which has five bedrooms and four bathrooms. Other features include an outdoor swimming pool with a private terrace, and a children’s playset which we imagine is a big hit with her nine-year-old son.

The actress is notoriously private about her home life, but she’s shared some glimpses inside her properties

Inside, listing photos show an all-white kitchen with an island unit and a large bay window flooding the space with natural light. It leads to a dining area with a table and chairs, while there is also an attic that could be turned into a spacious home office.

The neutral colourscheme and large fireplaces throughout offer a warm and inviting feel to the spacious property.

She appeared to show off her colourful bedding at another home

Neve and JJ are also thought to own a property in Brooklyn, New York. No doubt the couple have put their own stamp on the interior of their latest house – and judging by the glimpses she’s shared inside her other properties, it is likely filled with colour.

Photos the actress shared with her Instagram followers have shown a black table that appears to be positioned on a terrace area where she previously celebrated Mother’s Day, a green velvet sofa and a patterned cream rug in the living room where she was pictured cuddling Caspian, and multicoloured bed covers that were visible when she was treated to breakfast in bed.

READ: Goldie Hawn opens the doors into her rarely-seen LA home with unbelievable before-and-after photos

Read more HELLO! US stories here

The New Scream Is No Scream

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Scream. Photo: Paramount Pictures

The central challenge of any Scream sequel is how to do justice to the self-aware, tongue-in-cheek quality of Scream without either straying too far into comic pointlessness or meta-disappearing up one’s own meta-ass. Not every Scream sequel has achieved this balance; one might argue most haven’t. In part because director Wes Craven and screenwriter Kevin Williamson’s brilliant, scary, and even kind of moving 1996 original was itself something of a poison pill: It came preloaded with all the po-mo self-reflectivity one could ever want, taking place in a world where generations of slasher movies had already prepared the victims for all the genre clichés they were about to confront (and usually fall prey to). Any attempt to one-up the movie was likely doomed to fail, because it had already one-upped itself, and it had done so while also managing to be absolutely terrifying.

The new Scream at least seems to understand this on some fundamental level. It has a back-to-basics quality that might, at first, lull you into thinking it’s a more straightforward reboot. It opens with the obligatory girl-stuck-at-home-talking-on-the-phone attack, as teenager Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) is questioned by a mysterious voice that at first seems friendly, pretending to be a friend of her mom’s from “group,” but quickly devolves into the slithery, menacing cadences of Ghostface, who loves to quiz his or her victims about horror films (or, in Scream-speak, “scary movies.”) Of course, this is 2022, so Tara, it turns out, is more of an A24 gal and prefers so-called elevated horror. “Ask me about It Follows! Ask me about Hereditary! Ask me about The Witch!” she shrieks as things get more desperate — not long before she’s stabbed to within an inch of her life, with her leg broken for good measure. It’s a striking sequence, mainly because the talented Ortega makes Tara’s fear palpable as she goes from boredom to terror.

The attack on Tara prompts the intervention of her estranged older sister, Sam (Melissa Barrera), who along with her boyfriend, Richie (Jack Quaid), returns to the town of Woodsboro to take care of her sibling and also get to the bottom of who might have done something like this. Tara has, as one might expect, a close cohort of friends, all of whom could be the culprit but most of whom will become victims. Sam also enlists the help of former sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette), who is now divorced from TV personality Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox) and living in a trailer with bottles of liquor strewn around. Dewey in turn calls Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), prompting her to return to Woodsboro as well — no great surprise there, as every previous Scream movie has been, on some basic level, Sidney’s story.

We soon learn that most of Tara’s friends have some connection to the teens from the original Scream. A pair of twins, Chad (Mason Gooding) and Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown), are the nephews of Jamie Kennedy’s mouthy, long-deceased horror fiend Randy Meeks, and their living room TV has been rechristened the Randolph Meeks Memorial Theater. But as the callbacks to the original films accumulate, it becomes clear this is no typical reboot or typical sequel … Or, well, wait, maybe it’s actually quite typical for our times: One helpful living room back-and-forth among these movie-savvy kids soon explains to us that they’re all living through a “requel,” one of those projects that brings back the original characters to give it some official heft, while passing the torch to a new generation of heroes.

The movies cited are the recent Halloween films that brought back Jamie Lee Curtis, but a more appropriate reference point may well be The Force Awakens, which brought back beloved Star Wars heroes but made them background players in a younger cast’s story line. There’s even a Force-ghost of sorts — as one of the first film’s villains, Billy Loomis, played by a digitally de-aged Skeet Ulrich, regularly appears in mirrors and such to converse with Sam.

Certainly, the cosplaying Empire-wannabe villains of The Force Awakens have more in common with the Ghostface of this Scream — as we’re told early on that this mysterious killer (or killers; there are often more than one) must be a heavy-duty fan who just wants to bring the old Ghostface magic back, in response to the liberties taken by the eighth entry in the Stab franchise. (The Stab movies, as you may remember, are the Scream movies’ stand-ins for the Scream movies, serving as both a wink-wink, see-what-we-did-there echo of what happened with the Scream movies in real life and a cautionary tale about all the terrible directions the Scream movies could have taken.) We’re told that Reddit and 4chan have lit up with irate haters who took exception both to the fictional Ghostface’s newer weapons (including a flamethrower!) and to the Stab movies’ turns toward social justice. If the previous Scream films were all about the commodification of horror, this one is about the obsessive toxicity of fandom in general, whether it comes from horror nuts, Star Wars nerds, or Ghostbusters obsessives.

Okay, but did it have to be so lifeless? One of the reasons why all the meta-textual bloviating of the original Scream worked was because Williamson had a great feel for the hyperarticulate ramblings of suburban teens; his dialogue wasn’t realistic, necessarily, but it created its own world. (That’s maybe one of the reasons why so many of the young actors from the first Scream actually became stars, something relatively rare for the slasher genre.) And Craven, at his best, cleverly mixed humor and horror: He could undercut a moment with a laugh, but he also used that to make the moment scarier. The reason Ghostface is always kind of a klutz in these movies — no matter who they may be — is because it makes it that much more terrifying and tragic when the killer inevitably succeeds in gutting the victim.

But these new characters don’t really come to life in any meaningful way, and if they can’t come to life, their deaths (or near-deaths) become rather uninteresting. Despite the diversity of the cast, they all seem like variations of one another. Ortega’s Tara is the one high point, perhaps because she spends so much of the movie wounded and particularly vulnerable, and thus set apart from the crowd. As her sister Sam, the ostensible hero of this film, Barrera is particularly wooden, but that’s probably because she’s saddled with lines like, “And that’s why I changed, and I got weird and I got distant with you, why I went and started doing every drug I could get my hands on, until I couldn’t take it anymore and I left you.” (The actress was one of the stars of last year’s In the Heights, and she was enchanting in that, so we know she can act. I blame the script, credited here to Zodiac scribe James Vanderbilt and Guy Busick, but who knows how many studio hands these things go through.) The few moments of genuine emotion in the new film come primarily from the older characters, but it’s not necessarily because of anything they say or do in this movie. It’s because those of us who saw the earlier pictures have already formed some attachment to these people.

Directors Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett, who were previously responsible for 2019’s acclaimed horror-action-comedy Ready or Not (which Busick also wrote), do a nice job handling the cat-and-mouse chases between Ghostface and the victims, a hallmark of any Scream movie, but are not as confident when it comes to mounting any actual scares. They’re more interested, it seems, in not mounting scares: One scene that has someone opening closet and fridge doors repeatedly — with its nods to the horror trope of characters suddenly showing up behind those doors, a cliché already addressed in previous Scream movies — elicits knowing chuckles but is not actually suspenseful or even mildly frightening. It does feel, however, like something you’d see in a Scream movie, so maybe that’s the point. This new Scream is so determined to be a Scream movie that it forgets the primary, unstated rule established by the original Scream: You can sell anything to us, so long as you make it scary.

Neve Campbell Told Her Son He Was Adopted Immediately

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Neve Campbell says it makes “no sense” to lie to adopted children.

The actress appeared on “The Kelly Clarkson” Show” on Thursday to talk about the new “Scream” revival movie, but also about her advice for parents with adopted children.

“I think back in the day, we used to think ‘keep it from them and throw it at them when they’re 21 – so their entire reality falls apart,’”she said sarcastically, “Which makes so much sense.”

Campbell shares 9-year-old Caspian and 3-year-old Raynor with her partner actor JJ Feild. They adopted Raynor in 2018.

READ MORE: Neve Campbell Was Once Attacked By A Bear On A Movie Set In Canada

“The guidance I had was, even before they could understand the language, to talk about their birth mother, talk about their story, tell them who they are. Because of that, it’s no surprise for Raynor in any sense whatsoever,” she shared. “He was in Cynthia’s tummy, she made him.”

The mother-of-two went the extra mile and asked Raynor’s birth mother to help with the process.

“Before he was born, I asked her if she would share some photos or a letter and she actually made an entire album for him with photos of himself, things about her life and things that she likes… and I look through it with him,” shared Campbell.

READ MORE: Neve Campbell Weighs In On ‘Scream’ Fan Theory That Billy & Stu Were Gay

The couple is quite private about their family, but announced the news of their son’s adoption on Instagram in 2018 with a photo of the happy family together.

Clarkson commented that she never understood the wisdom behind keeping the truth from adopted children, which Campbell agreed, adding it “makes no sense.”

Campbell reprises her role as Sidney Prescott in the “Scream” revival which hits theatres Jan. 14.