Spoof films were all but dead. Could Scary Movie resuscitate them?

Remember when we used to laugh at the cinema? Not just chuckling at one-liners in a superhero flick, but slapping your knee every two minutes. There’s only one genre that specialises in such rapid-fire comedy: spoofs.

Parody films abounded between the 1970s and early 2000s, leaving audiences in stitches with their absurd slapstick and pop-cultural references. From Flying High to Team America: World Police, spoofs rarely failed to hit the funny bone.

But by about 2010, something had soured. Parodies were still plentiful, but they continuously fell flat. In 2007, Jason Friedberg’s Epic Movie poked fun at blockbusters like Narnia and Pirates of the Caribbean, but it hardly lived up to its title, receiving a dismal 2 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. Disaster Movie (2008), meanwhile, scored an even worse 1 per cent for its satirical take on natural disaster flicks.

Other spoofs of this era were similarly panned, including Vampires Suck, which parodied the Twilight franchise, and The Starving Games, which spat in the face of The Hunger Games. Many of these films were criticised for lazy writing, a lack of narrative structure and for taking some low blows (such as Disaster Movie making light of Amy Winehouse’s alcoholism).

These movies appeared to mark the end of the spoof’s golden era, and few filmmakers dared go near the genre in years following. Parodies didn’t dry up entirely, of course. Films such as Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019), Barb & Star Go to Vista Del Mar (2021) and Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) still trickled out to moderate success. However, most of these titles went straight to streaming. If you wanted to laugh, you had to do so at home rather than the multiplex.

Now, suddenly, some of the most famous spoof franchises, including Scary Movie, The Naked Gun and Spaceballs, are returning to the big screen.

Last week, the sixth Scary Movie landed in cinemas, 12 years after the previous film. Many fans wished the rebooted instalment would deliver the ludicrous energy of the first and second of the franchise’s movies, which smashed the box office and established the Wayans brothers as parody connoisseurs. What they didn’t want was a return of the lacklustre, overly sanitised fifth film, which premiered during the bleak 2010s period.

It seems these wishes were granted. Scary Movie 6 significantly exceeded its opening box office projections. It even beat the other major IP release that week, Masters of the Universe, which had a $US170 million budget compared to Scary Movie’s modest $US30 million.

The tides were arguably already turning be