Scary Movie Reboot in Development at Paramount

The Scary Movie series is getting a reboot with Fast and Furious' Neal H. Moritz serving as producer. Paramount and Miramax are partnering on the film, which is expected to start shooting this fall. 

The announcement about the Scary Movie reboot came during Paramount's panel at CinemaCon 2024; Miramax will reportedly finance the film while Paramount handles distribution. Those are the only known details at this point; no word on casting plans, a director, a story, or what kind of horror films this new Scary Movie will be skewering with its spoof comedy. 

The original Scary Movie (2000) did for spoofing horror what The Naked Gun had done for spoofing police mystery procedurals. However, The Wayans Brothers brought the sensibilities of their In Living Color sketch comedy show to Scary Movie, stitching together comedic vignettes that spoofed any number of different horror films (or pop-culture films in general) – usually based on some overarching theme, or horror movie trend happening at the time. Scary Movie went on for four additional sequels after the 2000 original 

Therein may lie the best chance that this Scary Movie reboot has of doing something familiar yet fresh. Horror movies have seen a lot of legacy sequels acting as soft reboots of famous franchises, mixing fresh new faces and veteran stars of a franchise. Examples range from Halloween (2018), The Exorcist: Believer, or the Scream series. Scream V and Scream VI already took shots at the "requel" trend in horror, but Scary Movie has a wide opportunity to do it with a much bigger comedic slant. There are major stars of the franchise (like Anna Faris, Marlon Wayans, Regina Hall, and Shawn Wayans, Carmen Electra, Kevin Hart, Simon Rex, and Charlie Sheen) who could all make a return cameo – and plenty of young stars who can be great stand-ins for recent popular horror movie characters. 

If horror requels aren't a prime subject for spoofing, there are newer trends like the haunted toy movies (M3GAN, Imaginary, Five Nights at Freddy's); the trend of horror movie universes like The Conjuring Universe and all its spinoffs (Annabelle, The Nun, etc.), and the more elevated prestige horror films that are released. 

The Scary Movie reboot could also take a hard look in the mirror and do some comedic reflecting on reboots themselves, getting hilariously meta about the fact that the film itself is a reboot. Film fans have arguably been waiting for someone to come along and really turn the frustration with rehashed creative ideas into cathartic laughs. 

Source: THR