Just to clear it up for everyone since the history of this franchise's rights are a mess simply because of how much they've hopped around: Back when the franchise started, Dimension (a label under Miramax, founded by the Weinsteins) produced the series. At the time, Disney owned Miramax. The first three films were released as such under the Dimension label, but in 2005, the Weinsteins broke from Disney to create the Weinstein Company. They bought Dimension outright from Disney, retaining the
Scream rights in the process, while Miramax lived on for a few Weinstein-less years under Disney before they sold it off in 2010.
Under the Weinsteins,
Scream 4 got made in 2011, and then skip ahead a few years to the
Scream TV series. Dimension teamed up with Viacom (hence MTV) to produce the first two seasons of the series that released in 2015 and 2016, but Viacom doesn't have the "rights" to Scream as a franchise, they were just producing partners, while Netflix initially had a streaming deal with TWC that included the series after its MTV debut.
By 2017, that's when things start falling apart related to Harvey Weinstein, but for our purposes, let's not get too into it. The point is that in 2018, Lantern bought out The Weinstein Company's assets, which included, of course, the
Scream rights, as well as the Dimension label.
Enter Spyglass. Spyglass was formed in 1998, and has a long, equally complicated history, but in 2019 it was revived and rebranded as Spyglass Media Group. Lantern bought a majority stake in the company, making it a division like Dimension, and now Spyglass is producing
Scream 5. All this is to say that Lantern Entertainment owns the
Scream rights in full now, so when you hear names like Dimension or Spyglass thrown around now, just know they're a part of Lantern.
When it comes to the TV rights, it's still Lantern that owns
Scream. As I mentioned, Viacom was a producing partner in developing the show, and when The Weinstein Company started having its problems, Viacom fronted emergency funds to produce the show's third season (released in 2019). With Lantern acquiring TWC, the question was raised about whether Lantern then owed Viacom a single dollar, as the production deal was between the Weinsteins and Viacom, not Lantern and Viacom. It's another complicated mess, something Viacom objected to in 2018 (you can read more on it
here) and was settled in early 2019 (read about that
here). Either way, Lantern was season three's distributor, just as TWC had been for the first two seasons, and the show moved to VH1.
In
Scream 5's case, as we all know now, Spyglass is producing it, while Paramount is distributing the film. (And fun fact just to show how some things come full circle... Miramax became a full subsidiary of Paramount, which is owned by ViacomCBS, this past April.) There are more details I glossed over, and I tried my best to sum it up otherwise it'd go on forever, but that's pretty much the gist of it.
Now, when it comes to HHN, I don't think it's controversial to say that
Scream's inclusion back in 2011 was problematic for the fact it caused Universal a major headache in dealing with Dimension/the Weinsteins. That's why we haven't really seen the property ever since. But - and I think this is a big one - now that Lantern owns the rights and the Weinsteins are out of the picture, it wouldn't surprise me if Universal is willing to test these new waters if Lantern is amenable to working with them for a future HHN (like to promote
Scream 5). Compared to just a few years ago, the
Scream rights are in a much better place than they were under the Weinsteins, so really it's just a matter - in my opinion - of Universal or Lantern making the first move to see if the other party would be interested.