\u2018Scary Movie\u2019 shins at box office after release<\/p>\n
When \u201cScream 7\u201d arrived in theaters in February, the Ghostface turning heads wasn\u2019t from the horror hit itself but from \u201cScary Movie.\u201d The trailer for the long-running parody series\u2019 sixth installment played before opening-weekend screenings of \u201cScream 7.\u201d After an enthusiastic fan response, star, co-writer and producer Marlon Wayans announced that the film\u2019s release would be moved up one week to June 5.<\/p>\n
The bet paid off. \u201cScary Movie\u201d earned $55 million domestically over that weekend, making it the highest-grossing debut in the franchise\u2019s history. Along with last year\u2019s reboot of \u201cThe Naked Gun,\u201d a \u201cSpaceballs\u201d sequel arriving in 2027, and rumors of a fourth \u201cAustin Powers\u201d movie finally coming to fruition, the film\u2019s success is the latest sign of Hollywood\u2019s spoof comedy renaissance. And its revival signals that theatrical comedies aren\u2019t dead \u2014 they just needed the right subgenre to lead the way back.<\/p>\n
While spoof comedies have been a cinematic fixture dating back to the silent film era, their heyday came in the \u201980s with a trio of films: \u201cSpaceballs,\u201d \u201cAirplane!\u201d and \u201cThe Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!.\u201d The latter two hailed from David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, who set the standard for the rapid-fire joke density, sight gags and pop-culture fluency that have come to define the subgenre.<\/p>\n
The Wayans brothers updated the formula for a new generation with 2000\u2019s \u201cScary Movie,\u201d a send-up of \u201990s slasher films like \u201cScream\u201d and \u201cI Know What You Did Last Summer.\u201d When the first \u201cScary Movie\u201d ended up grossing $278 million worldwide \u2014 more money than the films it was parodying \u2014 it launched sequels of its own. At that point, it seemed like the spoof comedy was a reliable commercial vehicle for studios: cheap to produce, easy to market, and a hit with audiences.<\/p>\n
But as Hollywood flooded theaters with them, the films began to deliver diminishing returns. In particular, the parodies from \u201cScary Movie\u201d co-writers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer that were released between 2006 and 2008 \u2014 \u201cEpic Movie,\u201d \u201cDate Movie,\u201d \u201cMeet the Spartans\u201d and \u201cDisaster Movie\u201d \u2014 earned abysmal reviews and stalled out at the box office. \u201cFriedberg and Seltzer have worn out their welcome,\u201d David Zucker said in a 2009 interview with The Guardian. \u201cThey don\u2019t spoof scenes from other movies so much as repeat them.\u201d<\/p>\n
At the same time, the culture itself was evolving. The rise of streaming services created a fragmented entertainment landscape, and outside of superhero franchises and \u201cGame of Thrones,\u201d the monoculture that helped sustain spoof comedies was eroding. This shift also had an effect on studio comedies more broadly, as stars like Adam Sandler and Kevin Hart signed deals with Netflix to release projects on the platform, while recent comedies from Will Ferrell and Melissa McCarthy were streaming originals.<\/p>\n
Over time, audiences became conditioned to treat comedies as something to watch at home, rather than make a trip to the theater for. Add to that studios viewing the genre as carrying the kind of economic risk that IP blockbusters are less susceptible to \u2014 especially when the humor doesn\u2019t always translate internationally \u2014 and it was a perfect storm. Comedies largely disappeared from theaters, even as they remained popular on streaming platforms.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe idea of comedy in the marketplace has been working in television and in streaming in a big way,\u201d Erica Huggins, president of Seth MacFarlane\u2019s Fuzzy Door Productions, said in a 2025 interview with the Los Angeles Times. \u201cThe more we change people\u2019s habits to appreciate and get excited about wanting to go and see it in the theater, it\u2019s going to catch on.\u201d<\/p>\n
A spoof comedy revival may be exactly what forces that change. These differ from most studio comedies in one crucial aspect: They rely on audiences having a common set of cultural reference points. That quality benefits from the communal nature of moviegoing \u2014 audiences get the jokes because everyone is in on them.<\/p>\n
To that end, while Hollywood has struggled to produce these shared experiences outside of superhero blockbusters in recent years, horror is one of the few genres that consistently cuts through the noise. The sixth \u201cScary Movie\u201d pulls from a number of recent films \u2014 including the \u201cScream\u201d reboots, \u201cGet Out,\u201d \u201cSinners,\u201d \u201cThe Substance\u201d and \u201cWeapons\u201d \u2014 that became box office successes in their own right. \u201cThe Naked Gun\u201d reboot achieved a similar effect, capitalizing on Liam Neeson\u2019s late-career streak of rugged revenge thrillers to deliver a playful skewering of action-movie tropes.<\/p>\n
In that respect, spoof comedies are a useful barometer for whether Hollywood has enough cultural touchstones worth lampooning in the first place. Between the new \u201cNaked Gun,\u201d \u201cScary Movie\u201d and a \u201cSpaceballs\u201d sequel that has decades of \u201cStar Wars\u201d films to parody, there\u2019s no shortage of material to mine.<\/p>\n
Streaming services still pose a threat to theatrical comedies, but if movie parodies continue to thrive at the box office, studios might just get the last laugh.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u2018Scary Movie\u2019 shins at box office after release When \u201cScream 7\u201d arrived in theaters in February, the Ghostface…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":365585,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[56277,2241,148370,25307,56654,148371,48,52,51,47,50,49,148366,143472,148367,90799,148369,143640,148368],"class_list":["post-365584","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-los-angeles","tag-cinema-of-the-united-states","tag-comedy","tag-david-zucker","tag-genre","tag-horror-film","tag-jason-friedberg-and-aaron-seltzer","tag-la","tag-la-headlines","tag-la-news","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-headlines","tag-los-angeles-news","tag-parody","tag-scary-movie","tag-scary-movie-film-series","tag-scream-7","tag-sequel","tag-streaming-media","tag-the-naked-gun"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365584","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=365584"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/365584\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/365585"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=365584"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=365584"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=365584"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}