The Naked Gun director David Zucker thinks that the new reboot of the franchise tried to copy his style.The filmmaker claimed that producer Seth MacFarlane “totally missed it” while trying to ape his style.Zucker also said the new Naked Gun “spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz,” but that “big budgets and comedy are opposites.”

David Zucker wasn’t particularly impressed with this year’s Naked Gun reboot.

The filmmaker, who co-wrote and directed the first two films in the comedy franchise starring Leslie Nielsen, opined that the latest installment in the series missed the mark in an interview with Women’s World.

Zucker said that he and his filmmaking partners — his brother Jerry Zucker and their collaborator Jim Abrahams — helped establish the norms of American parody movies, and that subsequent filmmakers tried to emulate their approach.

“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style — and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently,” he said. “People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.”

MacFarlane helped shepherd this year’s Naked Gun revival, which starred Liam Neeson as the son of Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, as a producer. The Family Guy creator was also credited with “Additional Literary Material,” according to the WGA. The film’s final screenplay was written by Dan Gregor, Doug Mand, and director Akiva Schaffer, whom Zucker did not name in his disparaging remarks.

Elsewhere in the interview, Zucker lamented the budgeting of contemporary comedies, including the new Naked Gun. “You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz,” he said. “Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.”

The new Naked Gun had a reported budget of $42 million, while Zucker’s original film cost around $14.5 million in 1988 — which, adjusted for inflation, comes to around $38 million in 2025’s dollars, which isn’t too far from the reboot’s budget. Zucker’s 1991 sequel, The Naked Gun 2½: The Smell of Fear, reportedly cost around $23 million, which translates to around $54 million today. And the 1994 threequel Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult, which Zucker co-wrote and produced, reportedly bore a $30 million price tag — equivalent to around $65 million today.

Zucker also hypothesized that Schaffer’s Naked Gun was only created for financial gain. “Everybody’s in it for the money now, and that feels like the only reason why they wanted to do a new Naked Gun,” the director said.

David Zucker; Liam Neeson.

Jim Steinfeldt/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty; Paramount

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The filmmaker emphasized that “there’s a certain method to the madness” that he and his partners articulated with a list of 15 spoof comedy rules. “I’m teaching them in the hopes that if anybody tries to do a movie like this again, they’ll do it right,” he said.

Zucker said that the trio began codifying their comedic rules after receiving advice from a friend who saw them perform a stage show in Los Angeles. “He explained that you need to have one person be the straight man while the other person is doing the jokes,” he recalled. “The person who was supposed to be the straight man was also trying to be funny, so that didn’t work, and that became our first rule. From there, we came up with 14 more rules, including the last one, which is, ‘There are no rules.'”