The Millennium in Frames: Was Scary Movie Good for Anything?

The Millennium in Frames is our close-to-chronological look at the most important, influential, popular movies since 2000.

Alright listen, we’re going to try to write some scholarly thoughts on Scary Movie here, which is not an easy task, so we’re going to go about this as directly as possible. First, let’s list some facts about Scary Movie:

• Scary Movie came out in 2000. It was the ninth-highest grossing movie of that year. It made over $250 million worldwide.
• We should repeat that for emphasis, because it’s worth emphasizing: Scary Movie made $250 million worldwide.
• There are three motifs in Scary Movie: 1) Light satire of teen-oriented slasher-flicks like Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer. 2) Jokes about a gay black man who’s trapped in the closet. 3) Unnecessarily deep cleavage.
• Scary Movie is a bit embarrassing in retrospect, and laughing at some of its jokes in 2016 also feels a bit embarrassing.
• Scary Movie spawned four direct sequels, as well as numerous spin-offs, including Date Movie, Disaster Movie, and Epic Movie. None of these movies are better than Scary Movie. Many of them are worse.
• While the According to Dazz staff pays for all the movies it writes about, we did not pay for Scary Movie. We feel pretty alright about this.

Scary Movie doesn’t age well. The jokes are dated and the shots at late-90s genre movies aren’t particularly sharp or thoughtful. It’s not worth a few cheap laughs and it’s not worth the nostalgia trip either, but it is worth one question: Why was this run of trashy spoof-flicks so popular, and what mark did they leave, if any, on modern movies?

The roots of Scary Movie probably stretch as far back as the indelible Airplane! and Naked Gun franchises. Those flicks are also spoofs and satires, but they’re remarkably durable in their humor. The jokes still feel of their moment (like Airplane!’s “Jim never drinks coffee at home”), but the aim is broad enough to still feel funny (that particular joke is based off a commercial from the 70s, but the way the line is sold onscreen still makes you want to laugh at it even if you haven’t seen the ad). Airplane! and Naked Gun work because they play with the idea of being movies more than they play with time-stamped cultural moments from the 80s. They could have been released in 2016 as-is, and we’d still find them novel and funny.

Not so with Scary Movie, or any of its iterations, really. Scary Movie dates itself by taking rifle-narrow shots at hyper-specific subjects. It doesn’t parody a genre or an idea; it parodies a few spastically-selected movies, and as our collective memory fades in regards to those movies, Scary Movie becomes less and less funny. Smart comedies don’t date themselves. Scary Movie practically locked itself in a time capsule. It makes total sense why it hasn’t had any legs outside the initial run in theaters. Watching it at home wouldn’t be a good-times flashback; it would just be confusing. (Fun tidbit: One of the flicks Scary Movie attempts to skewer, Scream, was originally titled Scary Movie itself. Another fun tidbit: We also rewatched Scream before taking on this topic, and it holds up much, much better than the actual Scary Movie.)

Flash-in-the-pan movies aren’t the worst thing, though. If we drop all our pretention and bias and look at the wide world of cinema as a menu, Scary Movie is like the 99-cent McDouble. It looks cheap and you’re definitely served what you pay for, but hey, for only a dollar, Scary Movie isn’t that bad. It’s a value meal: not as filling as you’d like, but it still tastes good for a few bites…right?

Scary Movie made more money than any of its sequels or spinoffs, and it isn’t close. It made $278 million worldwide, and the next highest, Scary Movie 3, made $220 million. That’s about a 21-percent difference decline between No. 1 and No. 2, and the other movies plummet even further from there. Scary Movie and Scary Movie 2 are the only flicks in the modern spoof-genre vein to make $100 million in America, and the newer movies, like Scary Movie 5 ($32 million domestic) and Disaster Movie ($14 million domestic) aren’t even acceptable as money-makers. They just stink. They just fail.

If we swerve outside the franchise, there’s little evidence that the spoof genre made any ripples in our pop-culture pond. Sure, there are some interesting, “Woah, they were in that?” appearances by now-megastar actors (Kevin Hart appeared in Scary Movie 3, Kim Kardashian was in Disaster Movie, and Carmen “What happened to her Playboy money?” Electra was in almost all of them), but there’s not even a lot of laugh-value in that. Those are trivia answers at best.

Nonetheless, people ate Scary Movie up when it came out. Its comedy is gross and made-you-look shocking, and maybe that had some impact, but there’s no denying that whatever it was trying to do, other movies did better in the past and in the future. In an age where comedy wants to fight against PC culture, maybe these movies can find an irreverent foothold in pocket niches, but that’s a long shot. After all, it’s been 16 years.

Financially, Scary Movie had good value, and studios milked that value until the conceit ran out of gas. Now, we can stir ourselves and remember that a dollar cheeseburger is a dollar cheeseburger, and like a sloppy McDouble, there’s little consequence to tossing this in the garbage. It only cost 99 cents anyway.

Next time, our look at 2001 begins with a revival of the ensemble movie: Ocean’s Eleven and The Fast and the Furious.