Name: Scary Movie
Director: Michael Tiddes
Genre: Comedy, Horror
Released: 2026-06-05
Duration: 95 min
Cast: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris, Regina Hall, Damon Wayans Jr.

A comedy franchise that helped bury one slasher revival is coming back to find horror bigger, richer and more self-serious than ever. Scary Movie returns with the people who built it: Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Anna Faris and Regina Hall, the quartet the marketing now calls the Core Four. It comes back on a single working premise: in a film business running on reboots, remakes, legacy sequels and prestige horror, no intellectual property is safe from being mocked.

That is both the joke and the business case. The original picture arrived just as the slasher had been resurrected, and it made a fortune turning fright into farce. The horror market this revival walks into is a different animal — a content engine that recycles its own titles on a schedule, sells nostalgia back to the audiences that aged out of it, and rebrands gore as art. Parody needs a target-rich environment. The pitch here is that the environment has never been richer. A genre that mass-produces its own myths hands a parodist an almost endless supply of ammunition, and the studios keep loading the magazine.

The casting is the strategy. Anna Faris and Regina Hall are the reason the early films worked as comedy and not just reference; Faris played Cindy Campbell as a deadpan survivor who never quite registered the carnage around her, and Hall’s Brenda was the franchise’s reliable detonator. Marlon and Shawn Wayans wrote and headlined the first two installments and then walked, and the series spent three more sequels without them, drifting toward gag-reel filler under different hands. Reuniting the four is an argument that the franchise was never the brand — it was these specific performers and their timing.

The history of the series is itself a lesson in mispriced equity. The first film was a phenomenon; each sequel earned less and meant less, and by the end the title was kept alive by inertia and low budgets. Bringing back the originators bets that audiences blamed the bad sequels rather than the concept, and that they will show up for the people who got it right the first time. The brand was damaged. The wager is that it was never broken.

Michael Tiddes directs, which keeps the revival inside the family. He has built his career almost entirely on Marlon Wayans vehicles, a run of broad studio comedies that trade on speed and on the actor’s willingness to do anything for the bit. He is not a satirist hired to elevate the material; he is the operator who knows how this troupe works and how fast it has to move. For a project whose entire value is tone, that continuity matters more than prestige.

The film positions itself as a referendum on the modern horror machine. The promise is a direct read on where the genre actually lives now: that it will cut through reboots, requels, prequels, spin-offs, elevated horror and every last final chapter that turns out not to be final. The first films chased specific hits. This one aims at an entire production logic, the studio habit of strip-mining its own catalog. If it connects, it will be because the audience already finds that logic ridiculous and wants someone to say so out loud.

None of that guarantees it is funny. The spoof movie is, commercially and critically, a dead format; the genre curdled into lazy reference years ago, and the later Scary Movie sequels were part of how it died. Reuniting the original cast fixes the personnel problem, not the structural one — a parody only lands if the jokes are written sharper than the thing they mock, and no IP is safe has been the genre’s boast for two decades without always being true. The nostalgia play also assumes an audience that remembers; a large share of today’s horror crowd was not alive when Cindy Campbell first failed to notice a killer in her house. The premise is strong. The execution is unproven.

Marlon Wayans returns as Shorty Meeks and Shawn Wayans as Ray Wilkins, with Anna Faris back as Cindy Campbell and Regina Hall as Brenda Meeks. Damon Wayans Jr. joins the principal cast, extending the family footprint into a second generation. Tiddes directs a script built to ricochet between targets rather than track a single horror property, the structural break from the original films and the clearest sign of what the revival wants to be.

Scary Movie runs 95 minutes and reaches United States theaters on June 5, after opening across much of Europe and Latin America in the first days of the month. It is a comedy built on a wager that the horror business has become its own best punchline. The Core Four are betting that the joke still needs them to tell it — and that a genre this bloated is, finally, an easy target again.