Ten parody films from 1980 to 2009 offer the best companion viewing for Scary Movie 6, which opened in theaters June 5, 2026, reuniting Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans and Regina Hall for the first time since Scary Movie 2 a quarter century ago. Each belongs to one of three distinct comedy waves that the franchise has always borrowed from.
Pre-release tracking had put the domestic debut at $43 to $53 million on a reported $30 million production budget, projecting the franchise’s strongest nominal opening since Scary Movie 3 in 2003.
The Reunion That Took 25 Years
The break between Scary Movie 2 and the current installment was not clean. Marlon Wayans has said the family learned the third film was going forward without them via a New Year’s Eve press announcement, and alleged that the original producers used the Wayans’ own pitch for that sequel while shorting the family on royalties from the first two. Three Wayans-free installments followed, and Scary Movie 5 posted the franchise’s lowest opening weekend in 2013.
The reunion came together after Jonathan Glickman, who had recently become CEO at Miramax, put up a reported $30 million budget. He has called the new film a “rebooquel”, framing it as a spiritual sequel to the original two. Confirmed parody targets include Get Out, Sinners, Longlegs, M3GAN and multiple Scream entries, with throwbacks to Ghostface, Leatherface and Jason Voorhees. Michael Tiddes directs from a script the Wayans brothers co-wrote with Rick Alvarez and Craig Wayans; Keenen Ivory Wayans, who directed the first two films, returned as a co-writer only. Returning cast members alongside Faris and Hall include Jon Abrahams, Lochlyn Munro, Cheri Oteri, Dave Sheridan and Chris Elliott, with Damon Wayans Jr. and Heidi Gardner among the newcomers to the franchise.
The box office gap between the Wayans era and the three Wayans-free sequels tells the story, per Box Office Mojo’s original Scary Movie franchise data:
- $278 million: original Scary Movie (2000) worldwide gross, against a $19 million budget
- $141 million: Scary Movie 2 (2001) worldwide gross
- $14 million: Scary Movie 5 (2013) opening weekend
- $897 million: combined franchise gross before the 2026 installment
The Parody Genre’s Third Coming
Parody films have arrived in identifiable clusters. The first ran from roughly 1980 to 1988, built by the filmmaking trio Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, whose credits include Airplane! and The Naked Gun, alongside Mel Brooks, whose Spaceballs arrived in 1987. A second cluster opened with the original Scary Movie in July 2000 and extended through the mid-2000s. The third is active now:
- The original wave (1980-1988): Airplane!, The Naked Gun and Spaceballs, each a deadpan genre parody played completely straight
- The Scary Movie era (2000-2007): the ensemble horror parody wave, from the original Scary Movie through Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
- The current revival (2025 onward): the Naked Gun reboot, this year’s Scary Movie installment, and the Spaceballs sequel arriving in 2027
Spaceballs: The New One, formally announced at CinemaCon in April 2026, opens April 23, 2027 via Amazon MGM Studios, with Mel Brooks, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga all returning to their original roles. The 2025 Naked Gun reboot, directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring Liam Neeson as Frank Drebin Jr., grossed over $100 million worldwide and earned strong critical reviews. Among the three franchise reactivations of the current wave, it arrived first.
What we’re trying to do is bring back laughter. This is about bringing back comedy the way it used to be.
Marlon Wayans, who co-wrote and produced the film, in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Horror’s Comic Cousins
Three of the ten films are closest to the horror-parody tradition, targeting genre conventions without becoming outright slashers.
| Film | Year | Primary Target | Notable Cast |
|---|---|---|---|
| Galaxy Quest | 1999 | Star Trek and sci-fi fandom | Sigourney Weaver, Alan Rickman, Tim Allen |
| Shaun of the Dead | 2004 | Zombie films | Simon Pegg, Nick Frost |
| Not Another Teen Movie | 2001 | Late-1990s teen comedies | Chris Evans, Jamie Pressly, Mia Kirshner |
Galaxy Quest opened in December 1999, roughly six months before Scary Movie’s July 2000 release, and shares a structural quality with the franchise: every actor plays their situation with complete seriousness. Tim Allen, Sigourney Weaver and Alan Rickman play the cast of a fictional TV series of the same name, recruited by an alien species that has taken the show as factual documentation of real events. Allen was known at that point primarily as a sitcom star; Weaver and Rickman for dramatic film work. The comedy builds entirely from the gap between their sincere performances and the absurdity of the scenario. The film received strong reviews on release and has held its reputation in the decades since, which is rare for a genre parody of any kind.
Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead leads the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy, which also includes Hot Fuzz (an action parody) and The World’s End (a sci-fi parody). Wright shoots the zombie sequences with the same handheld urgency the genre uses in earnest, hitting the source material’s beats faithfully before subverting them. The approach earned the film enough goodwill to sustain two follow-ups, a rare outcome for any parody.
Not Another Teen Movie arrived in 2001 in Scary Movie’s direct commercial wake, targeting She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, American Pie and Bring It On. Chris Evans, then largely unknown, plays the lead. Among the imitators that Scary Movie’s box office success produced over the following four years, it holds up as one of the sharper entries.
The Deadpan Standard-Bearers
Airplane!, released in 1980 and directed by Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams and David Zucker, targets the disaster films of the 1970s with a comedic structure built entirely on sincerity. Robert Hayes, Julie Hagerty, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen all play their parts with equal gravity, as if unaware a comedy is occurring around them. Nielsen, cast as a doctor aboard a stricken aircraft, delivers every line, including “Don’t call me Shirley,” as a sincere correction with no signal of the punchline. The film never acknowledges the joke. Airplane! received a Golden Globe nomination for Best Picture in the Musical or Comedy category and established Nielsen as the genre’s defining performer for the next two decades.
The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad!, released in 1988 and directed by David Zucker, extended the formula into a feature built around Nielsen’s Lt. Frank Drebin, a character originally from the short-lived TV series Police Squad!. Two sequels followed, both holding the franchise’s quality. The character got a full reboot in 2025: The Naked Gun, directed by Akiva Schaffer, starred Liam Neeson as Drebin’s son Frank Drebin Jr., earning $102 million worldwide and an 88% Rotten Tomatoes score. David Zucker said publicly he had no plans to watch the reboot but was glad audiences were “liking it.” He had originally worked on a reboot script himself before the studio moved forward with a different creative approach under Schaffer.
Anna Faris’s Cindy Campbell in the original Scary Movie uses the same framework: a genuinely frightened lead in genuine horror-film danger, with the jokes accumulating in the margins around her.
When a Parody Builds Its Own Mythology
Three films on this list went far enough into their targets that they built something separate from the genre they were mocking.
Tropic Thunder (2008), directed and co-written by Ben Stiller, follows a group of prima donna actors dropped into an actual warzone while shooting an action film. The movie grossed roughly $195 million worldwide, and Robert Downey Jr. received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Kirk Lazarus, a method actor who undergoes surgery to darken his skin to play a Black lead role. That choice, the film’s sharpest and most uncomfortable joke, sits at the intersection of Hollywood vanity and racial politics. Tom Cruise’s extended cameo as a bald, profane studio executive named Les Grossman requires the audience to know Cruise’s off-screen reputation to land fully; Cruise himself developed the character’s look and the distinctive prosthetic hands.
Mike Myers wrote and starred in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997), setting out to parody the James Bond franchise and ending up with two iconic characters: Austin Powers and Dr. Evil, each targeting a different layer of Bond mythology. Dr. Evil’s therapy sessions, his estranged son Scott and his inability to demand anything less than $1 million became better-known cultural touchstones than the Bond parody that produced them. Two sequels followed, running through 2002, by which point the Bond reference had fully receded into something of its own.
Black Dynamite (2009), written by and starring Michael Jai White, takes the blaxploitation films of the 1970s seriously enough to replicate their production aesthetic exactly, including intentional continuity errors and visible boom mics. White’s ex-CIA agent tracks down his brother’s killer through urban drug networks with no trace of irony. The jokes land only for viewers who know the films being imitated, which places Black Dynamite in the same tradition as Walk Hard and Airplane!: comedies where genre fluency does the work.
Films the Box Office Left Behind
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, directed by Jake Kasdan and produced by Judd Apatow, opened December 21, 2007, placed ninth for the weekend with $4.1 million behind National Treasure: Book of Secrets, and pulled from theaters four weeks later with $20.6 million total against a $35 million budget. It was, at that point, the lowest-grossing film Apatow had produced. John C. Reilly plays the fictional rock legend Dewey Cox across six decades of music history, covering every biopic cliche from traumatic childhood to arena superstardom to overdose to late-career redemption in 96 minutes. Reilly, then 42, opens the film playing Dewey at age 14, the age mismatch entirely unacknowledged by the script. Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Justin Long and Jason Schwartzman appear as the Beatles with deliberate miscasting as the joke. Reilly performed all of Dewey’s songs himself, including a nationwide tour in character before the release. The film found its audience in the following decade and now has a cult following its opening weekend gave no sign of.
Spaceballs (1987), Mel Brooks’s Star Wars parody, became a cult film rather than a blockbuster on initial release and accumulated its legendary status over decades of cable television and home video. The original film had already embedded a sequel joke in its own running time: the character Yogurt tells Lone Starr they will meet again in “Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money.” Brooks reactivated the gag at CinemaCon in April 2026 when revealing the actual sequel’s title, saying he had finally found the money “in my basement” and that Spaceballs: The New One is “just like the old one, but it’s newer.” The sequel opens April 23, 2027 via Amazon MGM Studios, with Brooks, Rick Moranis, Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga returning to their original roles alongside new cast members Josh Gad and Keke Palmer. Lewis Pullman plays Lone Starr’s son.
Scary Movie 6 is in theaters now. The Naked Gun reboot is on Paramount+. Spaceballs: The New One arrives April 2027. All three of the genre’s original franchise lines have had a new entry within a 24-month window.
