Emerald City Video

Scary Movie, a franchise that somehow lingered long after its single idea was long-since-exhausted, is back. A new trailer dropped today from Paramount, the movie studio that has publicly committed itself to serving the American right wing, and holy shit is it bad.

I’m not embedded this trash in the article. You can go find it on YouTube if you want. But the first joke in it is a lazy, unfunny “pronouns” gag and the second is “Anna Faris is a Republican now and she wants to you know that doesn’t make her racist.”

It’s embarrassing for Faris — who has done mostly good work, remained funny and charming, and got the internet’s goodwill in her divorce settlement with Chris Pratt — to be involved with this mean-spirited mess. Equally baffling is how Regina Hall, fresh from her appearance at the NAACP Image Awards, can sign off on this.

It’s a reunion movie, of course. Faris, Hall, and the Wayans Brothers are all reprising their roles from 25 years ago. Still, it feels lazy, unfunny, and mean-spirited in exactly the way the internet has been predicting Paramount movies would be since Skydance’s Trump-lackey bosses started talking about being more “pro-America,” which in this context really just means MAGA-friendly.

Scream 7 hit theaters on Friday and performed well at the box office in spite of a lot of bad blood between the right-wing studio and a vocal contingent of the Scream fandom, who were disappointed by how Melissa Barrera was treated (the star was fired after expressing support for Palestine, leading to the sequel being reshaped).

The notion of dropping a Scary Movie trailer on the Monday following the Friday of a new Scream movie should be an easy win — but all this does is underline the concerns audiences have about both the political sensibilities, and the quality control, behind a studio that is planning to acquire Warner Bros. in the coming months.