Scary Movie (2026) reunites the Wayans brothers, Anna Faris, and Regina Hall, but its stale rebootquel parody forgets how to be funny.
I’ll open with a confession, the way I usually do, because I walked into Scary Movie rooting hard for it. The story around the movie is wonderful. The Wayans brothers dreamed up the original in 2000 as a raspberry aimed at Scream, the Weinsteins took the franchise away from them over a money dispute so petty it qualifies as art, and the series wandered through three increasingly anonymous sequels that treated “remember this film?” as the entire joke. Now, over 25 years later, Marlon, Shawn, and Keenen Ivory Wayans stroll back through the door that once slammed on them. I wanted the movie to deserve that homecoming. Truly.
Anyway, Scary Movie (2026) spends 96 minutes parodying Scream (2022). Sit with that. Every other studio in Hollywood already strip-mined the legacy-sequel, of course. The one where you drag the original cast back, wink at the audience for showing up, and call the winking a screenplay achievement. But Scary Movie arrives years after that vein ran dry and starts swinging a pickaxe anyway, chipping out the exact same ore everybody else left in the ground.
The film knows this, too, which somehow makes things worse. A character actually explains the “rebootiquel” rules aloud, like a flight attendant pointing to the exits. The movie hands you the map to its own jokes and then expects applause on top of the supposed guffaws.
“We’re baaaaaaack.”
Here lies the central problem, and I mean it as a general observation rather than a cheap shot. Scary Movie mistakes naming a thing for joking about it. A real parody builds a trap. It studies the original, finds the load-bearing absurdity, and pulls the pin. The 2000 film did this gleefully! Regina Hall’s Brenda sat through Shakespeare in Love, lost her mind, and incited an entire theater to homicide. It remains one of the great sustained gags of the genre because it located something true about how movies make us behave.
The 2026 film, by contrast, gestures at Sinners, flashes Weapons, lets M3GAN do a booty dance. At one point they’re trying to do a parody of Ma, and it makes me wonder if they even saw the movie Ma. Ultimately, the film is confident that basic recognition equals basic comedy. But no, recognition equals recognition. I clocked every reference and laughed at roughly zero of them. Which left me feeling less like an audience member and more like a construction worker checking boxes on a clipboard while a building collapses in front of me.
The movie wants very badly for you to find it dangerous. The marketing promised crossed lines and slaughtered sacred cows. And yes, the film duly fires culture-war gags like a leaf blower aimed at a hedge. It blasts pronouns, DEI, a January 6 pardon, “slavery was a choice,” Diddy, Botox, a sheriff misgendering his own kid. I’ll say the genuinely scandalous part out loud. Most of these jokes simply repeat the slogans that right-wing posters already type into the void, then stand back as though repetition counts as wit.
“There are no safe spaces.”
Edgy comedy works through surprise. You smuggle the forbidden thing past the listener’s defenses and detonate it once it’s too late to flinch. Scary Movie instead reads the forbidden thing off a cue card and waits. The effect lands somewhere south of offensive and just north of a group chat that thinks it’s funnier than it is. I left convinced that anyone hoping to feel scandalized will go home disappointed. Which is its own kind of failure for a movie that built its whole personality around the threat of offense.
I want to give the performers their due, because they earn it. Anna Faris remains a marvel. Hand her the flattest line on the page and she finds a sincerity inside it, commits her whole body to the absurdity, and briefly convinces you a better movie hovers nearby. Regina Hall matches her beat for beat. The two of them share a chemistry that survives two and a half decades and a screenplay actively working against them. Marlon Wayans picks up Shorty’s joint like he set it down yesterday. And Shawn slides back into Ray with the ease of a man returning to a favorite chair.
So yes, watching the four of them reunite generates real warmth. But the studio surrounds that warmth with a cast of teenagers so thinly written they evaporate between scenes, sometimes literally. And the math of the movie becomes clear. People you came to see appear for minutes, and the void fills with kids reciting the screenwriters’ Reddit history.
The bottom line.
The finale gives the whole game away, and I admire its honesty even as I roll my eyes at it. The legacy characters turn on the next generation and essentially announce that they intend to take over the franchise. The movie literally dramatizes its own thesis — the old guard reclaims the property by stepping over the corpses of the new ideas — and then teases a vampire sequel that (like most of this movie) feels at least two years too late.
So I land where the story should have soared. The Wayanses won their franchise back, which I celebrate, and then handed us the precise self-satisfied meta-comedy that sank the franchise the first time, which I mourn. The whole enterprise plays like a writers’ room that filmed its own brainstorm and trusted us to mistake the transcribed chatter for jokes. I sat in a packed theater. A few people roared. Most of us watched a beloved comedy tradition discover it remembers the steps and forgot the music.
Scary Movie (2026) is now open in theaters. Watch the trailer here.
Images courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
