Parody movies are a tricky business. For every successful entry (Airplane! Not Another Teen Movie), there’s a corresponding mess of a movie made up of a series of poorly constructed jokes (often low hanging fruit) that barely comes together as a coherent film.
For most, the original Scary Movie (2000) – written, directed and starring the Wayans brothers – likely falls into the former camp. While much of that film’s homophobic humour (and especially its transphobic Miss Mann scene) has aged about as well as the Weinsteins’ involvement, the film was a massive commercial success and briefly reignited the parody craze.
Cue the drama. The Wayans were booted off of the franchise after the hastily created and poorly executed sequel, with Airplane!‘s David Zucker brought in for Scary Movie 3 before the series limped to its conclusion with Scary Movie 5 in 2013. That film didn’t feature a single member of its original creative team.
Thirteen years later, the Wayans are back at the helm with Scary Movie (2026). The new film is directed by Michael Tiddes, but the screenplay hails from the Wayans, including Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans (Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez are also credited).
In front of the camera, stars Anna Faris and Regina Hall are both back (each sat out Scary Movie 5), as well as Cheri Oteri, Lochlyn Munro, Jon Abrahams and Dave Sheridan (all absent since the original). It makes sense for so many Scary Movie originals to reprise their roles because the 2026 version is principally using Scream (2022) as its source text; that film famously focused on the stars of the original film returning to the franchise, while introducing a new generation of family members and the concept of the Requel (a remake/sequel).
The same basic narrative applies here: when her sister Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif, doing a weak Jenna Ortega impersonation) is attacked, Sara (Olivia Rose Keegan, playing the Sam/Melissa Barrera role) is lured back to Woodsville. Accompanied by her killer coded boyfriend, Jack (Cameron Scott Roberts, playing the Richie/Jack Quaid role), Sara attempts to solve the mystery while reconciling with her paranoid, gun-toting mother Cindy Cooper (Faris playing the Laurie Strode/Jamie Lee Curtis role from 2018’s Halloween).
Sara also recruits mentally disabled Officer Doofy (Sheridan, playing the Dewey/David Arquette role) while gathering together the next generation of victims, including the twin children of Brenda Meeks (Hall) and Sheriff Greg’s trans son (played by trans actor Benny Zielke, playing Scream‘s Wes/Dylan Minette).
It’s to be expected that with a 13 year gap between franchise films (and a 25 year gap between Wayans brothers involvement), the new film has a field day tackling cultural milestones of the interceding years. There are the obligatory mentions/jokes about #MeToo, Black Lives Matters, the Epstein files, and the COVID pandemic, among many others. Sadly these, as well as parodies of films like the aforementioned Halloween reboot, Ma, Get Out, The Substance and Sinners, all tend to land with a bit of a thud.
The exceptions include an inspired early sight gag of a Final Destination Xtreme theme park featuring the tagline “everyone dies”, as well as the very silly riff on Longlegs featuring Scary Movie 2‘s Chris Elliot as “Shorthands”, and a send-up of John Wick wherein Cindy takes on innumerable Ghostfaces.
Part of the film’s struggle is that by mapping itself onto a 2022 film, Scary Movie (2026) immediately feels dated. This is eventually revealed to be a deliberate choice and the film’s actual message, as evidenced by its climax and brief denouement, but until near the end of the film, the movie plays like a spoof that was written years ago and then arbitrarily updated with a few contemporary references.
Scary Movie (2026) works best when it is acknowledging itself as a text that shaped the culture twenty-six years ago. There’s a surprising power in revisiting some of the classic jokes from the first two films and witnessing the reunion of Faris, Hall and the Wayans (also evident in their delightful press tour). There’s an updated take on Cindy and Bobby’s gross-out sex scene; there’s a redo of Shorty’s (Marlon Wyans) infamous “Wazzup” bit; and the Wayans’ even manage to sneak in several digs at Miramax for their franchise firing and its decline in quality, including a brutally hilarious dig at Charlie Sheen.
At the end of the day, audiences who didn’t respond to Scary Movie a quarter century ago won’t be persuaded by the new film. It’s the same sex and drug jokes with sporadic physical comedy pratfalls, albeit with a slightly more adult approach to cultural changes in sex, gender and sexual orientation. But not too much!
After all, this is still a Wayans joint… 3/5
Scary Movie (2026) is in theatres June 5, 2026