Although she was unceremoniously fired from the franchise three years ago, Melissa Barrera remains a Scream fan.

The actress, who was fired for supporting “Free Palestine” in 2023, recently explained that her issue is with Spyglass Media Group, whose leadership “never apologized” for accusing her of antisemitism over her response to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel.

“Not with the company that currently holds the rights,” she said on JustWatch of whether she would return. “I love the franchise. I had an amazing time making those movies. But a lot of the hate and the difficulty that I’ve faced in the last years is because the leadership of that company made it a point to label me something that I’m not, and they never apologized, even when I was proven right.”

Barrera continued, “Even with an apology, I wouldn’t go back to work with them. So, not that I’m holding my breath. I don’t think they have that ability. But if the franchise were ever to leave those hands and go into hands that I think honor Wes Craven’s legacy more, I think yeah.”

Spyglass fired Barrera in November 2023 over her social media posts on the Israel-Hamas conflict and the “atrocities being committed against Palestinians,” with the company explaining they have “zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech.”

Paramount said Friday it plans to start moving the listing of its Class B shares from the Nasdaq to the New York Stock Exchange in early October.

Noting the still-pending $110 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery as a key variable, the company said in an SEC filing that the date of the shift could be subject to change. As of now, listing and trading of Class B common stock will end as of the close of the market on October 5 and begin on the NYSE on October 6.

CEO David Ellison told employees on Monday after legal settlements were reached with state attorneys general and the Writers Guild of America that the merger was tentatively on track to close about two weeks from that date. If that timeline holds up, that would put the close on October 5.

Both the Nasdaq and the NYSE have media and entertainment listings. The Nasdaq has long been more weighted toward tech companies, including Netflix. The Walt Disney Co.’s shares are among those traded on the NYSE.

A federal judge is scheduled to preside over a hearing on Monday to review the settlement and hear from the parties in the suits, with the hearing pushed back from its original date on Thursday of this week. The Block the Merger coalition and other opponents of the deal have filed amicus briefs reiterating their objections. The judge can alter terms of the settlement or even reject it outright, though instances of the latter have been rare.

If the deal is not closed by October 1, Paramount has agreed to pay WBD shareholders a $7 million per day “ticking fee.” The fee was a sweetener it volunteered earlier this year as a way of outmaneuvering Netflix in its pursuit of WBD.

Since the legal truce was declared, the industry has been reeling given that the timing and the terms of the settlement were both surprising. The combination will redraw the Hollywood map, putting two century-old studios, HBO and CBS under one roof and giving Warner Bros. its fourth corporate owner in the past eight years.

To the surprise of many observers of the case, Paramount is not being required to sell assets or make structural changes as part of the takeover. They are instead making financial commitments to domestic production, worker retraining as well as pledges regarding the number of annual theatrical releases and conducting separate pay-TV negotiations with distributors. The consent decree governing those commitments, which lasts five years, has prompted criticism in recent days given the perceived leverage of the plaintiffs since they filed suit in mid-July. Federal regulators had already approved the transaction.

Paramount said in Friday’s filing that its board of directors on Friday had authorized the stock move. The company expects to distribute warrants to purchase Class B shares on October 13, though that action will depend on the merger being closed.

The merger “is subject to further closing conditions, and the ultimate timing for the closing of the WBD merger, if any, is not yet certain,” the filing noted. As a result, the company said it may choose to cancel or postpone the move.

The New York Film Festival opens Friday night with a lineup featuring great films of 2026 along with heavy-hitting world premieres. Artistic director Dennis Lim insists the global bows are not “the be all, end all,” but if they come he credits the vibrant Big Apple audience.

“The New York audience engages with a film in a way that is meaningful to filmmakers and that creates a memorable launch for a film, so I would credit our audience for that,” Lim tells Deadline of this year’s slate, which includes Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes doc You Can See Everything, NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and world premieres from Luca Guadagnino’s Sam Altman biopic Artificial to Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth!, Tom McCarthy’s The Statement and the sequel Godzilla Minus Zero by Takashi Yamazaki.

Jonathan Glazer, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ava DuVernay will also world premiere new documentaries at this year’s NYFF, which runs through October 12.

“These films came to us and decided to premiere with us with for different reasons. It just so happens we have a certain number of them this year, which shows that we have proven in the last few years that we can be a pretty good place to launch a film,” Lim says.

NYFF’s 64^th edition opens tonight at Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall with James Gray’s Paper Tiger. DuVernay’s 14th, a direct follow-up to her acclaimed 2016 documentary 13th (which opened NYFF that year), is the closing-night selection.

Asked to tick down the lineup, Lim says Artificial “was in flux for a while with the change in ownership. When the film was at Amazon we did have conversations about it. It was not going to be a 2026 film. That changed when it landed at Neon” to join the indie distributor’s awards slate. Amazon dropped the nearly finished $50 million film after making a massive investment in Altman’s OpenAI, noting the project would be better served elsewhere. Neon acquired global rights in June.

Godzilla, conversely, “came pretty early, long before it was finished. There’s a tremendous amount of intricate effects work on the film. We started the conversation early in the spring. They did not do festivals with the previous film, which was a huge success for Gkids and Toho, and they were interested in doing something different with this one. We saw an unfinished version in the summer and though it would be really fun,” Lim tells Deadline.

“The Elizabeth Holmes documentary, obviously, had been in the works for a while. I knew of the existence of the film but was sworn to secrecy when they wanted to have maximum impact in Telluride. It was always understood that it would be a surprise there, and we would announce thereafter.”

You Can See Everything from A24 world premiered as a secret screening at Telluride, gobsmacking the audience. The Theranos founder allowed the filmmakers into her San Diego home with unfettered access in 2023 during the days before she reported to prison after being found guilty of defrauding investors.

Wrote Deadline’s Pete Hammond in his review: “Nothing seems to be off limits as they agree to be miced-up for at least 12 hours a day, wide-angle cameras in place to get all movements, with other cameras getting closeups. Fielder immerses himself in this weird world as someone she comes to trust, much to his astonishment, becoming so close she asks him along on that last drive to prison.”

The doc is Fielder’s feature film directorial debut. His 2023 Showtime comedy The Curse was the first and one of the few television series to world premiere in the NYFF’s main lineup, Lim recalls.

NAZA, which world premiered in Venice, was a late addition. The investigation into Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza was shot at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv where the filmmakers interviewed Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers about destruction and loss of life.

“Films are not made in vacuum, they are made by people. There has not been another year where I felt the films to be so directly in conversation with the real world, really are tackling contemporary reality head on,” Lim says. “I think whether they are documentaries or fiction, all films emerge from this world that we all live in together, the reality that we share, and they will engage with real world institutions.”

This year’s festival has set 119 films — 75 features and 44 shorts – across its Main Slate, Spotlight, Currents and Revivals sections along with a series of talks complementing the lineup.