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The Inevitable Downfall Of The Scary Movie Franchise
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May 27, 2025
When the first Scary Movie debuted in theaters, the slasher genre was at an all time high. Movies like Scream and New Nightmare were captivating audiences everywhere. But with Scary Movie's perfect parody being such a success it wouldn't be long for the parody genre to play itself out with a tidal wave of terrible movies. How exactly did Scary Movie's success lead to the downfall of an entire genre?
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Tell me your name and I'll tell you mine
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I don't think so. What's that noise? Oops. I farted. I didn't think you would hear me
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This is Scary Movie, and it's one of the funniest parody films ever made
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It's also one of the last truly great parody films to be made. After the massive success of the first film, the sequels and the spiritual successors to
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this film seem to decrease in quality at an exponential rate, leaving the general public
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unenthusiastic about nearly anything that came close to resembling a parody. When a film strikes gold at the box office, everyone wants to cash in, and eventually the well runs dry
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This leaves certain niche genres of movies feeling like, well, a ghost town
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Hey, you guys hear that? Parody films have existed throughout the entirety of cinematic history
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You can trace the lineage of these types of movies all the way back to the 1900s, 1900s, the first of which being 1905's The Little Train Robbery, meant to be a parody of The Great
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Train Robbery. For as long as people have been making movies, there have been people seeking to
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create comedy from the ideas presented within them. As time went on, the art became more and
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more refined. Parody burst fully into the mainstream of entertainment in the 1940s
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when Abbott and Costello began releasing their own series of films. They were the first ones who
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were able to define and effectively distill a formula for creating these types of movies in a
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way that would appeal directly to the mainstream consumer. In the 1970s, we were introduced to
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Mel Brooks, who was able to take what Abbott and Costello were doing to entirely new heights with
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incredibly high production value. After Brooks came the Zucker Brothers with inspired films like
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Airplane and The Naked Gun, which are near-perfect parodies of the disaster and noir police drama genres
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Cuban? No, Dutch-Irish. My father was from Wales. Scary Movie was released in 2000
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At that time, slasher films were gaining a ton of traction thanks to the success of Wes Craven's Scream and New
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Nightmare, both of which are meta commentaries on the slasher genre. Scream specifically shined a glaring light
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on the flaws that were present in the slasher genre. Never ever say I be right back because you won be back I getting another beer You want one Yeah sure I be right back Which inevitably paved the way for the Wayans family to capitalize on something that was
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ripe for parody. Did it kill your old high school shorty? Nah, it was in this movie Scream
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Same dialogue and everything. This is ill. Scary movie's success begins in the director's chair
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Keenan Ivory Wayans had already had some success as a parody filmmaker
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His films I'm Gonna Get You Sucka and Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking
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and Your Juice in the Hood are iconic entries into the genre. Marlon and Sean Wayans were already seasoned veterans
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when it came to writing comedy, and had both found moderate success on In Living Color
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and their own television show, The Wayans Brothers. Watching television shows doesn't create psycho killers
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Canceling TV shows does. The Wayans Brothers was a good show, man
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On the casting end, Scary Movie introduced us to a previously unknown Anna Faris and Regina Hall
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who are both pitch perfect, as well as veterans like John Abrams and Shannon Elizabeth
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The cast is able to capture the absurdity necessary to create effective parody
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and they filter it through a faux seriousness that serves as a perfect vehicle to drive the narrative of the film
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So with Scary Movie, you find yourself observing what happens when the right director
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writers, and cast come together to create a project that they are passionate about
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Why are you doing this, Poppy? At least you want some motive. Did Scream have a plot
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Don't think so. Scary Movie's humor might come off as crass, but at its core lies something incredibly smart, poignant, and funny
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This translated very well at the box office. To date, Scary Movie has made over $250 million
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against its modest $19 million budget. And when a film generates those kinds of numbers
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studios begin to get extremely excited to make more. What are you waiting for
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A sequel to Scary Movie entered production almost immediately after the first film's release
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utilizing a majority of the same creative team behind the original. And while it is still very funny
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it definitely feels like it was written, shot, and filmed in less than one year
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Some of the jokes are somewhat of a retread of its predecessor, and sometimes the film feels almost out of step with its own lane
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But it still delivers some quality laughs despite its glaring flaws After Scary Movie 2 came Scary Movie 3 which strangely enough was written by Craig Mazin
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who would go on to helm projects like Chernobyl and The Last of Us. The point here is that the entire creative team was swapped out
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and that magic that was so effortlessly captured in the first film began to dilute itself quite quickly as the franchise branched out
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The Scary Movie became sort of a catch-all parody for the horror genre, and relied heavily on cramming as many gags as possible
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into every second of the movie, rather than telling a cohesive story that inspired jokes
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from the respective genre. Help! I've f***ing gone crazy! Scary Movie 3 was still quite successful
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and if there's one thing Hollywood loves, it's a shameless cash grab by way of dogpiling
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onto something successful. If you think about a film like Transformers, when a film like that is successful
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you see studios begin to scramble to capitalize on the genre, which is why we had lesser films like G.I. Joe, 2017's Power Rangers, and Teenage Mutant Ninja
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Turtles released shortly thereafter. While the film that serves as the tip of the spear can
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typically be considered to be enjoyable, the films that follow tend to get worse and worse
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until people get tired and then move on. This is exactly what happened with the Scary Movie
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franchise. Its massive success served as the box office earthquake that caused a proverbial
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tidal wave of copycat parodies that were released with reckless abandon. Of course, he wants us to cut through our feet
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You go first. After Scary Movie, we had Date Movie, Epic Movie, Superhero Movie, Disaster Movie, Extreme Movie
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Meet the Spartans, Vampires Suck, and The Starving Games, among others. All of these films were peppered in between the new and increasingly disappointing installments of the Scary Movie franchise
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These films were produced as quickly as possible, with relatively low budgets, and it really shows
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The jokes are flat, the characters don't make any sense, the performances are forgettable
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They forgo any sort of ysis and commentary one might make about film genres and just
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repeatedly go after long-hanging fruit again and again. This is Sparta! In some instances these films just copy scenes from the films they parodying and insert fart takes Even the farting scene in Blazing Saddles was at very least grounded in the sense that it commentary on the dietary restrictions Cowboys had on the frontier
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It was still saying something. These films aren't really saying anything at all and play out like some sort of strange hyperactive fever dream
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Even stranger than that is the fact that these films were mostly made by the same two guys
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Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. For a while, these films managed to make money, nearly doubling their budgets every time
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Apparently, there was some type of market for lackluster parody films, and people would still show up to see them, at least for a while
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Audiences eventually stopped paying attention to these types of films. Profit margins began slimming dramatically right around 2008 with the release of Superhero Movie
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Every now and then, a new parody film will emerge, but it would appear that the public trust in Hollywood's ability to produce a quality
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parody film had effectively been broken. The success of Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2
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has never been reached. Nothing has even come close. Even films like Popstar
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Never Stop Never Stopping, or MacGruber, which are obviously great, flew under the box office
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radar. The age-old saying rings true here that a few bad apples really do spoil the bunch
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Quality comedy isn't something that you can mass-produce. It has to come from a place of
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inspired reverence for whatever it is you're making jokes about. When the rigid machinations
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of money-hungry studios start to take over, the jokes don't feel funny or inspired at all
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They end up feeling forced. Comedy needs to feel natural and surprising for us to really connect
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with it. And when we observe content that feels like someone forcing a million jokes into a
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loosely strewned together plot, it feels more depressing than anything else. When audiences
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are continuously let down time and time again, they simply move on
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You don't want it. I think I kind of want it. Okay, but just this once. Come on in
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We're ripe for a good parody film, and hopefully Mel Brooks' History of the World Part 2 will
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find enough success to greenlight Spaceballs 2, the search for more money
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