Will Scary Movie 6 bring spoof comedies back to the cinema?

Horror fans and comedy lovers got a shared treat this week with the surprising news that the Scary Movie franchise will return. Even better, the franchise's original creative team — the Wayans brothers —will return to the horror-spoofing series for the first time since Scary Movie 2 in 2001. Could this mark the reincarnation of the movie spoof as a genre?

Scary Movie arrived in 2000 as a raucous send-up of the horror genre — most notably slashers like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. The title even borrows from the original moniker attached to Scream during production. It emerged as a monster hit, earning $278m (£214m) worldwide.

Now, we all know what happens in Hollywood when something turns out to be successful. Suddenly, everyone wants to repeat that formula in the hope of repeating the box office. Scary Movie certainly did that, with four sequels arriving in the decade or so after the original. There was also a boom in similar genre spoofs and, for the most part, they were terrible.

The Scary Movie franchise itself hit diminishing returns pretty quickly. The Wayans brothers departed after the second film, with parody specialist David Zucker stepping in to direct the next two. Zucker had helped to usher in a previous golden era of spoof comedy in the 1980s with films like Airplane and The Naked Gun as part of the trio Zucker, Abrahams and Zucker.

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Unfortunately, Zucker wasn't able to recreate the genius of his 80s work and the Scary Movie franchise plummeted in pretty remarkable fashion. By the time Scary Movie 5 arrived in 2013 — directed by Malcolm D. Lee and co-written by Zucker — the series was dead as a doornail. When you've just made a dismal movie predominantly built around Ashley Tisdale hitting people with frying pans, it's probably time to bow out.

But around this time, the seeds Scary Movie had planted started to sprout into a new, fertile era for the spoof movie. The problem is that none of them were any good. Most of these films came from the minds of the filmmaking duo Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer, who were credited as writers on Scary Movie.

Friedberg and Seltzer spent most of the 2000s and 2010s crafting various genre spoofs to universally negative reviews. The likes of Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and Meet the Spartans were rightly reviled as lazy attempts to cash-in on Hollywood trends. Their 2010 Twilight send-up Vampires Suck has to be considered one of the worst films ever made. At a time when hating Twilight was en vogue and the series was the lowest hanging fruit possible, they made parodying it look very difficult.

They weren't the only ones doing this. The 2008 parody Superhero Movie — an admirably timely release in the year that gave us Iron Man and the start of the MCU — came from the mind of writer-director Craig Mazin. If that name sounds familiar, it's because he's now best known as the man behind respected TV dramas Chernobyl and The Last of Us. How times change.

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These movies were all pretty cheap to make and did reasonable box office business, but then they just sort of stopped. Partly, the appetite just disappeared — by the time Friedberg and Seltzer released The Starving Games in 2013, nobody noticed — and it's also partly the case that blockbusters became more self-aware and better at mocking themselves. What could a superhero parody do today that Marvel didn't do for itself in Deadpool & Wolverine?

It's easy in all of this to forget how much fun Scary Movie was back in 2000. And as a result, it's worth wondering whether the return of Scary Movie could inject some new life into the world of cinematic parody. All the genre needs is a creator with a sideways view on today's Hollywood and a willingness to pack a film with jokes over plot.

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Occasionally, we see versions of the genre. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's Jump Street films were essentially machine-gun action parodies and Netflix had a go at satirising airport fiction adaptations with its miniseries The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window. But there's definitely space for a big screen spoof movie in the mould of Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker.

Perhaps Scary Movie 6 will represent a new dawn for the cinematic spoof. Let's just hope it's a more fruitful dawn than the last one. No one needs to see Revengers: Infinity Bore any time soon.

Scary Movie 6 is projected to be released in cinemas in 2025.