A new Scary Movie is coming

More news out of CinemaCon today: the Scary Movie franchise is getting a reboot. Originally created by the Wayans Brothers, the movies were a parody of all things horror and launched the careers of comedic actors like Regina Hall and Anna Faris. The series fell off in 2013 after the release of Scary Movie 5, but it’s now being revived by Paramount Pictures. According to Variety, Paramount has recruited Fast And Furious producer Neal H. Moritz to help get a new Scary Movie in theaters by 2025 with the franchise’s studio Miramax financing the production.

Parody movies have always existed, of course. But the Scary Movie series kicked off a spoof trend in the early 2000s such that every subgenre you could think of was getting its own [X] Movie parody. There was Not Another Teen Movie, Date Movie, Superhero Movie, Disaster Movie, and even more hyper-specific parodies like Vampires Suck and The Starving Games. The Wayans family is responsible not just for the resurgence of the parody’s popularity, but for several more spoof films over the years (Dance Flick, A Haunted House, Fifty Shades Of Black, etc.). But the brothers behind Scary Movie were pushed out from the franchise after Scary Movie 2, and the keys to the kingdom were handed over to the previous generation’s parody masters, David Zucker and Leslie Nielsen.

The Wayans’ split from Scary Movie was not an amicable one. “[The Weinstein’s are] not the best or the kindest people to be in business with,” Marlon Wayans told Variety in 2020. (Scary Movie was distributed by Dimension Films, which was run by Bob and Harvey Weinstein.) “They’re very much an evil regime, I guess. They do what they want to do how they do it—and it can be rude and quite disrespectful. We couldn’t come to terms on the deal. It’s like, ‘If you don’t want to pay for the jokes, have somebody else do it.’” He added, “We read on Christmas Eve that they were going with someone else for [Scary Movie 3],” Marlon said. “We probably could have sued or whatever, but part of us was like, ‘All you can do is allow us to create something new.’ I could write a book on that whole thing, honestly. They definitely still owe us money, lots of money. What they did was really bad business.”

The rebooted Scary Movie will likely look for a fresh start, but bringing the Wayans Brothers back into the fold could be a way to right a historic Hollywood wrong. In any case, the horror genre has evolved in some interesting ways over the last decade (with the emergence of so-called “elevated horror”), so there’s plenty of material ready for spoofing. We’ll see what direction the new film takes when it goes into production in fall 2024.