You’ve heard of a prequel. Thanks to Scream, you’ve heard of a requel. You may even have heard of a paraquel. Now, let Marlon Wayans introduce you to the rebooquel.
The famed funnyman is ready to reveal the first trailer for Scary Movie 6, his grand return to the horror comedy franchise he kickstarted with brothers Shawn and Keenen Ivory Wayans over 25 years ago. In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly ahead of the first look at the Wayans’ long-awaited return to Scary Movie, which also marks a reunion with beloved series stars Anna Faris and Regina Hall, Marlon says that Scary Movie 6 is more than just “a complete reboot, starting back where we began the franchise in 2000.” In a word, it’s “a rebooquel.”
And that’s not all. “This movie is multi-generational. It’s a conversation comedically that is needed, that needs to be had from our generation down to Gen, what is it?” Marlon thinks aloud. “Gen Alpha. And it’s all inclusive.”
The first few seconds of the trailer for Scary Movie 6, directed by Michael Tiddes, tease a host of new targets from the past two decades of horror history for Marlon and his brothers, who co-wrote the film, to skewer. The titular slasher from last year’s Heart Eyes and the gruesome glambot M3GAN menace the passengers of a New York City subway, recalling the Scream franchise’s move from the suburbs to the big city with Scream 6.
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Wes Craven and Kevin Williamson’s meta-slasher was the Scary Movie franchise’s original lodestar, and it returns in the sixth installment, when a dancing M3GAN tears away its costume to reveal it’s actually Ghostface, brandishing a glinting buck knife. As the specter guts the trailer’s first casualty, Scary Movie 6 announces its tone. “Oh my God, he stabbed her!” a woman cries. “I’m not her! My pronouns are they/them,” the victim cries back. “He stabbed them!”
Marlon himself, back in character as the lovable pothead Shorty Meeks, then makes it official in the next scene, declaring directly to the camera, “We back!”
“What we’re trying to do is bring back laughter,” Marlon tells EW. “This is about bringing back comedy the way it used to be. And I think the only way to do it is you have to cancel the cancel culture.”
The trailer doubles down on that goal, putting viewers on notice with a sequence of intertitles that spell out, “There are no safe spaces.” Faris’ Cindy Campbell performs lewd acts on Ghostface with a pair of dildos, one of the running children from a Weapons spoof gets knocked into space by a car, and a young girl opens a “present” from a parody of Terrifier‘s big bad, Art the Clown. It’s a severed pair of testicles, which she drops with a precocious, “What the f—?”
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Marlon explains it simply: Scary Movie 6 is a return to the franchise’s fundamentals. “We’re gonna do what we always do. We’re gonna make fun of everybody because we’re equal opportunity offenders,” he says. “We have a recipe, we have a formula that you can’t mimic or copy. You could try, but it’s very specific. It’s how we grew up, and it’s how we see the world. It’s the household we were raised in with the sense of humor that we all were governed with, that we inherited from our mother.”
“We like to be fearless,” he continues. “Yet still do things with kid gloves to let people laugh at themselves.”
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Scary Movie 6‘s equal-opportunity offense is clear from the trailer. Safe spaces and pronouns aren’t the only butts of the joke. When Cindy and Hall’s Brenda Meeks finally reunite, a disheveled, later-years Laurie Strode-looking Cindy tells her former bff, whose blob-like wig and cozy cardigan make her a dead ringer for Octavia Spencer’s Ma, that they probably shouldn’t hug.
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“I’m a Republican now, so I’m supposed to be racist,” Cindy explains. But Brenda’s nonplussed. “Oh, girl, I think all white people are racist anyway. Come here!” The last of the core four, Shawn Wayans, who played the closeted jock Ray Wilkins in Scary Movie and its sequel, finally pops up in Brenda’s house after a group of teens tells her they’ve arrived to “do some half-gay s—.” Ray slides into frame at Brenda’s side to question them: “Why half?”
“We laughed all the way through,” Marlon reflects on the making of the film. “We let everyone have fun, we let them improvise, and you’re gonna see it all over this movie. All of these references.” And there are a ton, from Sinners and Longlegs to Get Out and Smile.
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Marlon and his brothers’ last hurrah with the franchise was 2001’s Scary Movie 2. Though both the sequel and its predecessor were box office sensations, grossing many times over the modest budgets they were made on, the Wayans’ parted ways ahead of the greenlit third installment over disagreements with the series’ executive producer, Dimension Films founder Bob Weinstein.
He cites three reasons for returning to the franchise after 25 years: the “dismantling of the Weinstein regime;” the encouragement of his father, Howell Stouten Wayans, who “wanted me and my brothers to work together again;” and “God,” who told him, “This is what you should be doing.”
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“I got me and my brothers together to come back to a franchise that we were removed from,” he says. “I think the assignment is to bring back the cast, bring back me and my brothers working together, and to bring back big-ass laughs. The world needs a big-ass laugh.”
Scary Movie 6 arrives in theaters June 5th.