Spoilers ahead, including the ending.
The sixth Scary Movie has an ending that explains the whole project better than any press tour could. After ninety minutes of Ghostface killing off the new generation, the killers turn out to be Anthony Anderson and Shaquille O’Neal, who get murdered in turn by Shorty and Ray. Shorty and Ray’s grudge is against Anderson, Shaq, Cindy, and Brenda for making Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 without them. Then the young final girls pitch themselves as the new leads with the originals in supporting roles, start insulting their elders, and Cindy, Brenda, Shorty, and Ray tie them up and leave them to burn in the house, announcing that nobody is taking the Scary Movie franchise from them.
That’s a family settling a 25-year-old score on screen, and it’s the funniest idea in the movie.
How we got here
The backstory matters more than usual. After Scary Movie 2, Marlon said Miramax offered the brothers the same pay they got for the first film, which would have amounted to a pay cut, so they moved on to White Chicks and their pitch reportedly became the basis for Scary Movie 3 without them. Keenen told Anna Faris not to do the third one, but she was locked into a three-picture deal and worried about getting sued if she walked. Two decades later, Marlon credited two things for the return: the downfall of Bob and Harvey Weinstein and encouragement from their father, Howell Wayans, before he died in 2023.
So this is a revenge movie in more ways than one. The question is whether it’s a good comedy.
The plot, such as it is
Teenager Tuesday Campbell gets attacked by Ghostface while watching “Horror Movie,” an in-universe spoof of Scary Movie. Her half-sister Sara drags their mother Cindy out of hiding, now a paranoid recluse, and the old crew regroups. Brenda now goes by “Ma” and attends church with her husband Ray, who says he’s renounced his homosexuality. Brenda does the Randy Meeks job of explaining the rules and figures out that the killer is running a “rebootquel,” bringing back legacy characters alongside new ones, which puts every original in danger.
From there it’s a delivery system for parodies. The trailer confirmed Get Out, Longlegs, Sinners, Scream (2022), Scream VI, Halloween (2018), Smile, M3GAN, The Substance, and Weapons. There’s also a stoned Shorty hypnotized into a KPop Demon Hunters style animated sequence, Cindy fighting her way through a house full of Ghostfaces John Wick style, and a Michael parody with Kenan Thompson playing Jermaine Jackson in a fake biopic trailer.
What works
Anna Faris and Regina Hall are still the reason to watch these. Faris plays a burned-out, paranoid Cindy with the same total commitment she brought in 2000, and Hall gets the best material as a church-mom version of Brenda who still can’t stop talking. Even critics who hated the movie tend to carve them out; IndieWire’s Alison Foreman gave it a C+ and singled out Faris and Hall for praise.
The legacy-sequel material is where the jokes have teeth, because the Wayans are parodying a trend they’re participating in. A movie about a franchise being handed to younger characters, made by people who lost their franchise and just got it back, ends with the old guard murdering the new cast. That’s a real point of view, and it’s more than Scary Movie 5 ever had. Kim Newman at Empire, who gave it two stars, still said the last ten minutes nearly become funny by leaning into the tension between the holdovers and the younger cast, and Richard Roeper praised the twist ending.
What doesn’t
The middle is a list of sketches. Once Brenda lays out the rebootquel rules, the movie mostly cuts from one parody target to the next, and too many of them are recognition gags where the joke is that you’ve seen the movie being referenced. That’s the Friedberg and Seltzer disease that killed the spoof genre in the late 2000s, and the Wayans don’t fully avoid it. Owen Gleiberman at Variety argued the jokes feel more asserted than delighted, and that the film isn’t finding anything new between the lines of the Scream genre.
The target list is also odd. The Wayans had a decade of elevated horror to tear into, and a lot of runtime still goes to Scream. Roeper made the same complaint, arguing it should have spent its time mostly on modern horror like Get Out, Sinners, and Weapons. The Sinners and Weapons material also looks bolted on because it was: extra shooting happened in April 2026 to add parodies of Sinners, Weapons, and Michael.
And the marketing promised a movie that would “cancel the cancel culture,” which mostly translates into jokes about Brenda’s nonbinary kid, Greg’s trans son, and Ray’s church-sanctioned heterosexuality. Some of it lands as a jab at liberal earnestness, some of it is the same gay-panic material that was already the weakest part of the 2000 film with a new coat of paint.
Where it sits in the franchise
Here’s how the six stack up, by my count:
The first Scary Movie (2000) is still the best. It had one clear target in Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, a director in Keenen who clearly studied those films, and Regina Hall getting murdered by an entire theater audience. It’s also the biggest earner, at $278M worldwide.
Scary Movie 2 (2001) was the Wayans’ rushed follow-up, a haunted-house spoof of The Haunting and The Exorcist with some great bits (the James Woods exorcism opening, Tim Curry, the evil cat fight) and a lot of padding. It made $141.2M.
Scary Movie 3 (2003) and 4 (2006) are David Zucker’s movies. They swapped the Wayans’ R-rated edge for Airplane!-style PG-13 absurdism, Leslie Nielsen as the president, and parodies of Signs, The Ring, Saw, and War of the Worlds. They’re different animals, and 3 is funnier than people give it credit for. Scary Movie 3 took in $220.6M and Scary Movie 4 made $178.2M.
Scary Movie 5 (2013) is the bottom. No Faris, no Hall, no Wayans, and a Paranormal Activity/Black Swan spoof that nobody asked for. It made just $78.3M.
The 2026 film slots in at third, behind the first and third movies. It’s the only sequel that feels like it was made by people with something to say about the franchise itself, even if that something is “this is ours.” It’s also the first since 2001 to sound like the Wayans’ sense of humor.
For October viewing, it’s on Paramount+ as of September 3, and the digital release includes an extended cut with 13 minutes of extra footage and an alternate ending. Run it back to back with the 2000 original and the ending hits harder, because you’ll have just watched these four characters in their twenties before watching them burn their replacements alive.
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