The Wayans brothers birthed the original Scary Movie spoof and then after one mixed sequel in 2001 they were ditched by the studio. There were three more Scary Movie sequels that became less and less popular. The Wayans stuck by their raunchy satirical playbook, making two A Haunted House spoofs and even a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey. Now the Wayans brothers are back, along with Scary Movie alums Anna Faris and Regina Hall, the real MVPs of the franchise. It’s a homecoming, a nostalgic throwback for fans of the original Scary Movie, and a hopeful upswing for big-screen studio comedy to make a comeback. If only the movie were funnier.

Since the last Scary Movie sequel in 2013, horror movies have flourished. There’s the Conjuring franchise, which has made over a billion dollars, the miraculous ascendancy of Jordan Peele as an Oscar-winning horror maven, as well as the rise in elevated “A24-style” horror, movies heavy in atmosphere and layered metaphors, by the likes of Ari Aster, Osgood Perkins, Robert Eggers, and Zach Cregger. Coralie Fargeat was even nominated for Best Director for making The Substance, generally unheard of in Academy Award history. There is so much that can be satirized about horror since 2013, especially how it compares to horror from the 1980s and 1990s. Instead of tackling any of these new perspectives and movements in a meaningfully satirical manner, Scary Movie 2026 is, much like the Scream franchise itself, stuck in the past. This movie could have even covered the evolution of modern slashers into grueling gore endurance contests, like the Terrifier films, or the more experimental genre deep dives like Ti West’s Pearl trilogy with Mia Goth and In a Violent Nature. That would require more effort, so since Scary Movie 2026 is setting itself up as a reboot/legacy sequel, there is a logic for it to attach itself to the plots of Halloween 2018 and Scream 5 (it’s shocking how much plot is pulled from Scream 5). However, any satirical derision over the nature of cash-grab franchise reboots is reserved for the very last ten minutes, which happens to be the best part. Instead, there are too many moments where the same joke is run into the ground (like Ray being closeted, which doesn’t make as much sense in 2026 America), or the end result is just somebody getting hurt. Personally, I chuckled maybe about five times, so my entertainment output was not high. The best joke is a visual gag that goes unspoken about the very disastrous Final Destination amusement park.

The spoof pacing requires a lot of material to burn through, and as a result everything gets sucked into the comedy cauldron whether it seems related to horror or not. There’s a parody of the Michael Jackson movie, most likely because it’s popular and not because there are new jokes to be had about one of the most famous celebrities who’s been dead for over 15 years. I’ll save you the time: the punchline is that a man moonwalks and falls down the stairs. Why is there an animated sequence parodying K-Pop Demon Hunters? Why is there an extended John Wick parody? The answer is simple: because they made money. Like the Friedberg/Seltzer (Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans) playbook, anything that has some minute draft of pop-culture cache gets thrown into the mix, sometimes references that have a perishable shelf life that will be considered old only in a matter of months. I wouldn’t ever advise it, but if you go back and watch any of the Friedberg/Seltzer spoofs of old, you probably won’t be able to remember a quarter of the references. This is because the filmmakers are sacrificing the integrity of their comedy for the quick dopamine hits of timely pop-culture recognition. Is anyone in five years going to remember that the Meagan robot became meme-famous from her weird dance? That’s all the Wayans seem to remember about M3agan, so that’s all you’re getting, folks. It all feels like swimming through someone else’s half-forgotten memories of pop-culture relics.

There’s also a string of jokes that I’ll call “these kids today don’t get it” observations from an older generation feeling rapidly out of place and thus resentful. Look, Gen-Z culture is ripe for satirizing and mockery, but when your targets are pronoun preferences and a trans character just… existing, then it certainly feels like your satire is regurgitating the same grievance points as most hacky Boomer comics. Every rendition of this felt like an example of the “old man yells at cloud” Simpsons meme. If they really wanted to hone in on this generational misunderstanding, they could have really gone further in the different perspectives from Cindy (Faris) and her teenage daughter, but that doesn’t really happen. It all makes the comic perspective feel not just out of touch but grasping and desperate. Why include a trans kid if the only joke is going to be a tedious series of misgendering them? These jokes are meant to act as a comedic heat shield, proposing the Wayans as no-holds-barred comics, unafraid to tackle whatever modern taboos we may have across politics. Except the fact that these jokes are so thin and obvious and disposable creates the unmistakable impression that these are sops for a commercial demographic, the same people that would get excited by seeing a character on the poster with a “woke is broke” sign.

Let’s analyze just one example of the creative rut here. Weapons was a popular movie from 2025 and Amy Madigan’s Aunt Gladys character instantly became iconic. There’s plenty you can do with this character and the modern-day scenario of a wicked witch absconding with children (sample: Kristi Noem as Aunt Gladys as she cruelly sets up child abductions as part of ICE – the makeup preferences between the two could also cement the connection). The only thing Scary Movie 2026 does with this Oscar-winning horror movie is so thoroughly lazy and half-hearted. The joke is that the Trick or Treat kids received weed gummies and are running around high. That’s at least a starting point, and you could see where there could be comedic misunderstandings and mischief. However, that setup is just it. There isn’t anything else. We watch kids running like they did in Weapons and they have offhand ADR lines along the likes of, “I’m so high.” The worst example is a kid just saying the “six seven” meme. That’s it, like the utterance of the meme is the joke, another lowly example of the reference being misunderstood as a joke. Then one of the kids gets hit by a car (ha ha). Do we feature the driver freaking out thinking they’ve killed a kid? The kid protected thanks to the weed gummies? The driver mistaking the inebriated child for a dangerous tool for killing like, you know, in Weapons? Anything? The car hitting the kid, bouncing them high into the air like a trampoline, is the end of the scene. That’s it. It’s practically an admission that the writers didn’t know how to end their scene, and there are many, many examples of this throughout where scenes just abruptly end, lacking larger punchlines and escalation. It’s just weak.

The funniest thing might be the unintended poor timing on Scary Movie’s part. Had this movie waited maybe four months or longer, it could have incorporated the summer horror resurgence happening presently at the box-office. Backrooms is slated to become A24’s highest grossing movie of all time, opening at an eye-popping $80 million. That’s superhero movie numbers. Then there’s Obsession, which has grown and grown from its wide release and is now slated to become Focus Features’ highest grossing movie of all time. Obsession is a phenomenon we haven’t seen in decades. It made more money in its second weekend than its opening weekend, and then it made more money in its third weekend than its second, and then in its fourth weekend of release it STILL amazingly made $25 million. This is a genuine word-of-mouth sensation. I don’t want to overload you on box-office numbers, but as of this writing, Obsession has been released for a total of 24 days and only one of those days did it gross less than $3 million, and that was its fourth day of release. This just doesn’t happen, let alone to a movie that cost under a million dollars to make (we’re talking Paranormal Activity-levels of success here, where a $15,000 budget indie grossed nearly $200 million worldwide, and that was in 2009 dollars too).

I bring this up because horror movies are clearly a force to be reckoned with in the larger culture, and with the success and critical accolades for movies like Get Out, Sinners, The Substance, and Weapons, there is plenty of material available to satirize this new ascendant horror movement. That’s why Scary Movie 2026 is even more disappointing and dispiriting, tying itself back to teen slasher movies that haven’t been relevant for decades. There was so much this movie could have critiqued about horror as it is today, and instead we get sketches without punchlines, fleeting reference-based humor, and lazy jokes that settle for easy vulgarity without a wisp of cleverness. With any comedy, especially spoofs, your mileage will vary on the hit-to-miss ratio, and it’s hard to be really mad at the Wayans for doing their same schtick for decades, but Scary Movie 2026 feels less transgressive and edgy and more tired and dated and, sadly, lost. It feels like the Wayans have lost hold of the cultural zeitgeist or the ability to recognize it, and as such Scary Movie 2026 isn’t any better than any other Scary Movie sequel slop. It’s all exaggeration and mugging with the same old scatological punchlines (when there are punchlines) and further diminishing results.

Nate’s Grade: C-