Marlon Wayans Once Found out He Wasn’t Doing ‘Scary Movie 3’ by Reading the Trades
As many know, actor and comedian Marlon Wayans created the Scary Movie films along with his brother Shawn Wayans.
But the brothers would later learn they were no longer a part of the franchise in a very impersonal way.
Marlon Wayans learned he wouldn’t be doing ‘Scary Movie 3’ anymore while reading the papers
Wayans struck a huge hit with the Scary Movie films. The franchise was popular for parodying other successful movies at the time while mixing in their own humorous original stories. Some of the films the movies were known for parodying were The Matrix, Scream, and The Exorcist.
With the success of the first film, pressure was put on the Wayans brothers to write a successful sequel quickly. According to Marlon Wayans, that was when trouble started between him and the studio.
“What my brothers and I did was take a $19 million movie and we made it into a half-a-billion-dollar franchise. We got rushed to do a sequel. It still performed, but not the way we wanted it to. It wasn’t as good as the first one. It was all right. It wasn’t using its jab or hook. It was just right hand, right hand, right hand. It was a little more desperate,” Wayans once said according to Chicago Tribune.
Afterward, Wayans learned they wouldn’t be doing Scary Movie 3 the way most people did.
“And then we read in the trades one day they were doing Scary Movie 3 with somebody else. We were like, ‘Wow, that’s interesting.’ They took a franchise we did and that bombed,” he said.
Marlon Wayans was disappointed with what the ‘Scary Movie’ films turned into
Wayans once expressed a lot of disappointment with what the Scary Movie franchise turned into down the line. Apart from the third Scary Movie, the franchise spawned two more sequels as well. It ended with Scary Movie V in 2013.
But to Wayans, the quality of the movies ended with the third film.
“We watched our own franchise go to s***,” Wayans once told Complex. “Scary Movie was a good franchise that we started—now, I don’t know what the hell it is.”
Wayans’ own parody movie, Haunted House, was getting ready to release around the same time as Scary Movie V. And Wayans had no doubt that Haunted House would end up blowing Scary Movie out the water.
“You can take the franchise we created, but you can’t take the talent and jokes behind it. You can only fool audiences but for so long, and for so long the audiences have been fooled. They got fooled on Scary Movie 3 and they got fooled on Scary Movie 4,” Wayans said. “Now, we’ll see who got the goods. I don’t wish the people behind Scary Movie 5 anything bad, though. I wish them love. I just know that mine is going to make people laugh. I don’t know what theirs is going to do.”
Marlon Wayans explained what separated ‘Scary Movie’ from similar parodies over the years
The Scary Movie franchise wasn’t the only series of parody films that hit theaters at the time. Similar parodies like Epic Movie and Vampire Sucks also came out to poke fun at mainstream movies. However, the White Chicks star asserted that those same parody movies were nothing like the two original Scary Movie projects.
“Lately I’ve been watching these parody movies that have been coming out, and if you notice when me and my brothers do parodies, they make sense,” he said. “We don’t just bunch stuff together. We have a science to the math that we like to apply, so that it’s not jarring to watch. I watch these parodies from the last 10 years and they don’t make no sense at all. They jump from one movie to another movie and then another movie.”
