The Wayans family didn’t just bring “Scary Movie” back. They reminded Hollywood just who helped make parody comedy a box office force in the first place.
The sixth installment of the horror-spoof franchise opened to a franchise-best $105.5 million worldwide, including $55 million domestically, according to Deadline. That was enough to beat out the big-budget “Masters of the Universe” reboot and put “Scary Movie” back on top more than two decades after the original film turned horror, pop culture, and bad decisions into one of the most quotable comedy franchises of the early 2000s.
For Black audiences, the return hits a little differently. “Scary Movie” has always existed in that sweet spot between mainstream absurdity and a very specific kind of Black comedic timing. It is loud, ridiculous, inappropriate and often smarter than it pretends to be. Before memes became the language of the internet, the Wayans family was already turning pop culture into punchlines at full speed.
This time around, no recent horror hit appears to be safe.
According to Entertainment Weekly, the new “Scary Movie” takes aim at a long list of films and cultural moments, including “Scream,” “Smile,” “M3GAN,” “Terrifier,” “Longlegs,” “Nosferatu,” “The Substance,” “Ma,” “Get Out” and Ryan Coogler’s “Sinners.” The film also stretches beyond horror with jokes aimed at “Wicked,” the Michael Jackson biopic “Michael,” livestreaming, politics and pandemic-era culture.
The movie also marks a major family reunion for the franchise. Shawn and Marlon Wayans return alongside original stars Anna Faris and Regina Hall, with Keenen Ivory Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans, Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez among the writers. Regina Hall is back as Brenda Meeks, one of the franchise’s most beloved characters, while Marlon Wayans returns as Shorty.
That matters because the original “Scary Movie,” released in 2000, arrived from a comedy lineage that had already reshaped television and film. From “In Living Color” to “Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood” to “White Chicks,” the Wayans family built a brand by understanding what audiences were really talking about — then pushing the joke several steps further than polite company would allow.
In the new film, that approach includes riffs on some of the most talked-about Black horror of the last several years. “Sinners,” Coogler’s blockbuster horror film, gets more than one spoof, including a church scene and party sequence. “Get Out,” Jordan Peele’s modern classic about racism, liberal performance and the Sunken Place, also gets pulled into the chaos.
That’s where the movie’s cultural timing becomes interesting. Horror has become one of the most important spaces for Black filmmakers to explore race, history, trauma, survival, and spirituality. “Get Out” changed the industry’s expectations of what Black horror could do. “Sinners” kept the conversation going on a blockbuster scale. Now, “Scary Movie” is coming in to lovingly clown the genre’s seriousness while still benefiting from the cultural weight those films created.
It is also arriving at a moment when Hollywood is being reminded that audiences still show up for comedy when the right people are behind it. The industry has spent years treating theatrical comedy as risky, especially the kind that is broad, physical and unafraid to offend. But “Scary Movie” opening this big suggests viewers may have missed laughing together in a theater — especially at a movie that knows exactly how unserious it is.
The box office win is even more notable because “Scary Movie” reportedly cost far less than some of its competition. Deadline reported that “Masters of the Universe,” a splashy fantasy reboot tied to Mattel’s He-Man property, opened behind “Scary Movie” domestically despite its much larger scale. In other words, nostalgia worked this weekend, but not all nostalgia is created equal.
For the Wayans family, this is not just a comeback story. It is a reminder of ownership, timing and cultural memory. Black comedy has long been a blueprint for mainstream entertainment, even when Hollywood does not always acknowledge where the rhythm, references and fearlessness come from.
“Scary Movie” is not trying to be prestige cinema. It is not trying to win the discourse. It is trying to make audiences laugh at the movies, the headlines, the trailers, the memes and the things everybody has been talking about for the last 25 years.
And judging by the opening weekend numbers, plenty of people were ready to laugh with the Wayans again.
