Scary Movie is the first straight R-rated comedy to clear $100 million since Girls Trip

Everyone had written the genre spoof off, and then a $30 million Scary Movie reboot walked into the summer and made $100.5 million in the United States. That makes it the first straight R-rated comedy to clear $100 million domestic since Girls Trip in 2017, a nine-year gap that tells you exactly how dead this kind of movie was supposed to be.

The wider numbers are louder. Scary Movie has $108 million from overseas on top of the domestic figure, for $208.5 million worldwide in three weeks, against a negative cost of $30 million before marketing. Paramount and Miramax are not going to apologize for that math.

The franchise crossed a billion

The reboot did more than turn a profit. It pushed the 26-year-old series past $1 billion at the global box office across its six films. Here is how the pile got built, by reported worldwide cume:

Scary Movie 5 was the floor, a $78 million afterthought in 2013 that felt like the last shovel of dirt. Thirteen years later the brand is the second franchise to cross $1 billion this summer, after the two Devil Wears Prada movies got there on Meryl Streep and a sequel. One of those is a prestige fashion comedy. The other spends its runtime putting a condom on a microphone. Both work.

Why this one landed

The reason is not complicated, and it is mostly about who showed up. The Wayans family is back in the franchise as writers, stars and producers for the first time since Scary Movie 2 in 2001, when creative fights with the original producers pushed them out and David Zucker took over for parts three through five. Miramax chief Jonathan Glickman and EP Marc Weinstock engineered the reunion. Michael Tiddes, who has spent a decade making parody and broad comedy with the Wayans on A Haunted House and the Netflix titles, directed.

The cast is the other half of it. Anna Faris and Regina Hall are back, the two performers most people actually picture when they think of this series, alongside Marlon Wayans, Cheri Oteri and Dave Sheridan. The opening reflected the goodwill: $105.5 million worldwide out of the gate, a franchise record, with the domestic side beating the new Masters of the Universe on the same weekend.

There is a real lesson in the receipt. A studio spent $30 million on a brand audiences had affection for and performers they missed, rated it R so it could actually be the thing it is, and let it rip in a summer where the comedy shelf has been close to empty. The margin on that is better than most tentpoles will see all year.

The catch

A billion across six movies over 26 years is not the same as a billion in one shot, and the table flatters the brand by stacking films released across three decades. Inflation does a lot of the lifting between 2000 and now. None of that changes the part that matters to Paramount and Miramax: the cheapest movie in the franchise just became one of its biggest earners, and it did it on a property the industry had stopped taking seriously. A seventh one is already the easiest greenlight in town.