‘Scary Movie’ (2026) Forgets to Be Funny
For some reason, modern audiences are having nostalgia for the Scary Movie franchise. The once-shepherded-by-the-Wayans-Brothers spoof series that parodied contemporary horror cinema had a cult following in the years after its successful release, but none of them were any good. The only ones that were watchable, Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, had David Zucker’s involvement, one of the masters of the art of sight gags and stupid humor. Keenen Ivory Wayans’ first two entries are mostly forgettable and painfully unfunny.
Apart from Keenen’s I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, none of the subsequent Wayans Brothers-produced comedies are very funny. Most of them may have developed a cult following, but their brand of references-equals-joke humor gets tiresome relatively fast. While this sixth installment of Scary Movie might make some solid returns at the box office, audiences are in for a reckoning as they’ll realize, in real time, why the spoof genre essentially died at the beginning of the 2010s.
The plot of Scary Movie (2026)
Instead of directing the picture themselves, the Wayans enlisted Michael Tiddes (one of the worst comedic filmmakers working today) to helm this “requel” of the franchise, largely inspired by the plot of Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett’s Scream. The opening scene simultaneously riffs on Scream 6, Scream 4, and the fifth film, as Ghostface (Dave Sheridan) hunts down the families of Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris) and Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall), in an attempt to kill the “legacy” of the Scary Movie franchise.
A painfully unfunny festival of references
The marketing campaign for the film promised that it would “cancel cancel culture” and that “heads would roll” at how funny it is. While it certainly has its fair share of referential humor, ranging from obvious callbacks to Sinners, Weapons, Wednesday, The Substance, Longlegs, John Wick, Terrifier, Get Out, Ma, and, surprisingly, KPop Demon Hunters, the filmmakers forget to make the movie funny. Simple references to horror movies audiences have seen are expected to equate to the joke, but there’s nothing Tiddes and screenwriters Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans, and Rick Alvarez do to elevate the reference and make it funny.
There’s a reason why Akiva Schaffer’s reboot of The Naked Gun worked. It wasn’t just a callback to the original franchise, instead staging sequences where visual (and physical) comedy was played in pure deadpan fashion and ensuring that the goofball nature of the project responded well with the actors’ silly performances. Scary Movie (2026) stages a series of non-consequential vignettes that are each visual and verbal references to the horror movies that have defined the late 2010s and early 2020s, and that’s it.
An entire scene in which news anchor Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri) wants to become younger again to compete with the world’s TikTok influencers (a direct recall of Coralie Fargeat’s The Substance) culminates in a reference to Keenen Ivory Wayans’ White Chicks. There’s no punchline or payoff. The joke is the reference. You get it, or you don’t. The only funny bit in this 96-minute bore occurs in that scene, where Gail’s bodily transformation releases The Epstein Files (unredacted). What does this say about me for having laughed at this? You tell me…
Actually, I laughed at another scene, the only one with a punchline, which involves Ghostface and streamer Kai Cenat. To say more would mean spoiling a great—and downright nasty—bit of cruel violence, but the scene yields in an unexpectedly funny turn. I’ll have to give the Wayans Brothers kudos for that, and that only.
The rest of the humor feels tired and trite, attempting to poke fun at “woke” culture while avoiding offense on either side of the political spectrum. If you want to go after the left by calling charging stations for electric cars “Woke Watt,” at least make the jokes unapologetic and go at it. The Wayans seem afraid to do something that possesses the same shock as I’m Gonna Git You Sucka, which is one of the most transgressive comedies ever made. It refused to even tone down the screenplay’s array of offensive humor, which caused some to completely miss the point that Keenen was trying to make.
In Scary Movie, Tiddes and the Wayans have completely forgotten what made Keenen’s debut feature such an important piece of comedy and settle on bland quasi-homages to mask the lack of humor on display. There are references aplenty, but what’s funny about them? What’s the intent behind just referring to things people have seen and leaving it at that? There’s nothing particularly original or inspired about the film’s set pieces and its lack of comedy. The movie will frequently stop dead in its tracks to stage reference bits and come back to the film’s main plot, but none of the digressions have any tangible impact.
Here’s an example: as Cindy’s daughter, Tuesday (Savannah Lee Nassif) is in the hospital following the Ghostface attack on her life. She turns on the television and sees a trailer for an upcoming movie focused on Michael Jackson (Kenan Thompson), done in the same aesthetic as Antoine Fuqua’s Michael. It turns out that this film is actually about Jermaine Jackson. That’s the joke. The movie stops to do a painfully cringeworthy parody trailer and resumes as soon as it’s over, onto the next vignette, until it attempts to “break” the 2022 Scream’s silly ending and be transgressive for once.
Final thoughts on Scary Movie (2026)
Funnily enough, the Ghostface motivations make more legible narrative sense than Kevin Williamson’s horrible Scream 7, but they’re still not enough to save this latest iteration of the Scary Movie franchise from being dead on arrival. It’ll make tons of money. Parody films almost always do because they’re made cheaply.
Look at how horrible the Jason Friedberg & Aaron Seltzer films were received. Most of them are commercial hits. The audience doesn’t care. They want to have keys jingling at their faces and think they’re getting something of substance out of it. That much is clear. Scary Movie will give them exactly that. Nothing more. Nothing less. Will it become a future cult classic? Probably not, but it will certainly greenlight more entries in perpetuity.
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