Source : the age
From the opening frames of the new Scary Movie trailer, it’s clear this is an off-the-rails, take-no-prisoners reboot of a horror comedy franchise famous for fearlessly taking aim at everything. Surprisingly, however, it sprang out of a very serious comedic moment.
Back in 2023, comedian Marlon Wayans’ critically acclaimed, deeply personal stand-up comedy special Good Grief put him on a stage, in front of a camera, as he embarked on a cathartic examination of the loss of his parents, mother Elvira, who died in 2020, and father Howell, who died in 2023.
That special was intended to be funny, but leaned deeply into Marlon’s pain, an almost alchemical punchline that is only created when comedies crack open the darkness.
Think of moments such as Will (Will Smith) processing his dad, Lou, letting him down yet again in The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. Or when Roseanne (Roseanne Barr) said a bitter goodbye to her deceased father in Roseanne. Or when Terry (Terry Crews) was racially profiled in Brooklyn Nine-Nine.
Funny moments, in a sense, but they cut deep. For Marlon, the experience realigned his focus and made him determined to bring back the joyful mischief of Scary Movie.
“It’s maturity of the comedian, right?” he says. “You go through enough life and you hit enough stages that your voice becomes a little bit different. Your point of view changes and shifts and it grows and you still stay fearless, but you understand that you can go and dive into any dark pool and still navigate your way through those dark places and find the humour.”
That confidence is borne from a life on the stage, the 53-year-old New York-born comedian adds. “You just get this kind of confidence because you spend so much time on a stage or spend so much time doing it,” Marlon says. “Between me and my brothers and my sister, we have 250 years of comedy between us.”
The exhumation of the Scary Movie franchise – reboot, sequel, or both? – essentially returns the Wayans brothers to the creative steering wheel. It also corrects a contractual wrangle that saw them pushed out of the franchise they had created after a clash with producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who ran Miramax, the studio that made the films.
Harvey Weinstein’s fall from grace has been well-reported. But a minor headline in the shadow of a much bigger scandal was the manner in which the Wayans brothers were pushed out of Scary Movie after the first two films.
After grossing almost half a billion dollars at the box office, off the back of astonishingly lean budgets, the Wayans asked for a better deal. Instead, Miramax proceeded to make three more sequels, with diminishing box office receipts, without them.
“We could have fought for it, we could have sued, there was a lot of things we could have done legally,” Marlon says. “We’re a very religious, spiritual family. Vengeance is God’s, it’s not for us to strike back. So we let God speak. So to see the dismantling of a dynasty that tried to strip us and hurt our dynasty, that wasn’t us, that was God.”
In getting it back, “we’ve learned how loyal and wonderful the audience is and how excited they are that we got the franchise back,” Marlon says. “[The fans] missed the flavour of the Wayans. And that speaks volumes to our brand in particular.”
The new film is written by brothers Marlon, Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans, their nephew Craig Wayans and screenwriter Rick Alvarez. Keenen, who directed the two original movies, remains a producer on this project, but it is directed by Michael Tiddes, who directed the two A Haunted House parody films, written by Marlon and Alvarez.
The working dynamic, as co-writer and co-producer Shawn says, is simple: “Keenen is the boss, the head guy, and me and Marlon are his co-pilots. We get in a room and we watch these movies and at the end of the day, he has the final say.
“This one, though, was more Marlon’s labour of love,” Shawn adds. “The first two were closer to me and Keenen. With this one, Marlon had something he wanted to say and so we supported him in that journey.”
The film brings back the original characters Shorty Meeks (Marlon), Ray Wilkins (Shawn), Cindy Campbell (Anna Faris), Brenda Meeks (Regina Hall), Bobby Prinze (Jon Abrahams), Doofy Gilmore (Dave Sheridan) and Gail Hailstorm (Cheri Oteri).
Shawn, 55, describes it as a very happy reunion. “Love for each other and a love for comedy and a love for our characters… Behind that love, there’s chemistry and that’s the secret sauce right there. Those elements all coming together is what breeds the chemistry to give that audience that experience and make the audience feel like they watched something special.”
Adds Marlon: “It was fun working with them. You make this great movie together collectively and you step away from it for 20 years and then you’re called to come back. And it’s kind of like ‘Avengers, unite!’ but it felt like a great high school reunion. It felt good. It felt nostalgic.”
Returning to the franchise some two-and-a-half decades after it was launched, there is a delicate dance around what to change, and what to leave the same.
“You’ve got to figure out where things are culturally,” Shawn says. “Where are we at? How has the world changed? … Then you need to find out how to make your characters funny in that time. What’s funny about them now? What are the movies that we find funny now?”
Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2 parodied everything from Scream, The Matrix, The Blair Witch Project and The Sixth Sense, to The Haunting, The Exorcist, Poltergeist and even Charlie’s Angels. “We had a bunch of movies that we found humour in,” Shawn says. “We pulled from what was in the zeitgeist.”
The challenge in 2026 is that horror, as a genre, has substantially evolved. The era of Halloween, The Ring and The Exorcist feels somewhat vintage. New horror is inventive and does not hew to genre tropes. Think Hereditary, Get Out, Talk to Me, Good Boy and the current genre darling, Curry Barker’s career-elevating masterpiece Obsession.
“Horror’s a lot darker than it was back then, more gory,” Shawn says. “Even the Scream [movies] are bloodier than they were back when we made fun of them. Also, you have elevated horror, smarter horror now with Get Out and movies like that.”
Regardless, Shawn says, “the movies now, we had to do the same work. We had to watch those movies over and over again. And once again, it was about finding funny things in those movies that we can attach our characters to and tell jokes and comedic throughlines and set pieces.”
In purely historical terms, the emergence of the Wayans family goes back to the American sketch comedy In Living Color. Launched by the Fox Network, it was somewhat counter-culture. It was also, like many Fox series at the time, produced on a shoestring budget and depended on the comedians in its cast to do much of the heavy lifting.
As a crucible, it produced a top-tier roster of comedic talent. Not just the Wayans, but also Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, Tommy Davidson and Chris Rock. If you looked closely at the show’s dance troupe, The Fly Girls, you would also have spotted Jennifer Lopez and Carrie Ann Inaba.
But the trajectory of the Wayans family came to a significant cultural and political dot point when Scary Movie was released in 2000. With a $US157 million US domestic box office, the film became the highest-grossing R-rated film by a black director at the time.
The impact that has had on black filmmakers is impossible to calculate. But as an idea, “it more exists with [the media] than it does with us,” Shawn says.
“At the end of the day, we are very appreciative of the love that we get for the work that we’ve put out and has been received with open arms,” he says. “But we don’t think about the impact much. We see it, we hear the fans dig it or not dig it, and we just keep moving on to whatever the next thing is that we find excitement and passion in.”
As a reflection, and a reaction, to the wider cultural experience and the prevailingly negative headlines in the news cycle, Marlon says the Scary Movie reboot is “bigger than a comedy; I think this is about bringing smiles back to people’s faces. I think this is a revolution and an evolution back to ourselves, back to our smiles.
“We’ve become so toxic with social media and so negative, and I think that finally we get to have a movie that we can just put our phones down and we can just go sit in the theatre and laugh at, and with, each other,” Marlon adds.
“That’s the nostalgia of the ’90s. We remember when we used to laugh, we remember when humour was outrageous, when you [could] say anything and just know that the purpose of it was not to hurt your feelings, it was to make you laugh.
“With this movie, I want people to laugh again, man,” Marlon adds. “I think it’s a very important movie because as silly as the movie is, it’s for us to not forget the child in us.”
That silly little kid “that lives in all of us” is vital, Marlon says. “No matter how old we get, you always got to stay in touch with that little mischievous child because that’s the thing that’s going to rescue [us] through all the darkness of the world and of life.
“I’ve been through a lot of darkness in the last five years of my life, and somehow the little boy in me finds the humour and it rescues me from depression. I feel like the world needs this medicine as much as I did.”
Scary Movie opens on June 4.
