Scary Movie 3 & 4

[Ravi]

Jesus, $49.7 million?!?!!?    .... So many great movies that never hit that figure. And the previews for this movie look soooooooo tired.

EDIT: Snips out the AP story that I posted two minutes after Mac.

I'm still stunned, by the way.

People are idiots.  It is no surprise to me that it is number one.  I expect the next Scary Movie to have Anna Faris in a yellow jumpsuit fighting thousands of Agent Smith clones.

[modage]

this is the ultimate 'market researched' movie.  they're like "hey, how do we maximize profits?"  well, first of all we need to make it PG13 so we can get all those younger kids.  second we need to get Queen Latifah, Ja Rule and Eddie Griffin so all the black people will go.  third we need to get a bunch of hot chicks like Denise Richards, Pamela Anderson, and Jenny McCarthy so all the young dudes will want to go.  and then we need to string together a bunch of parodies to anything that appeals to young people, and it doesnt matter if it makes sense.  like, atleast the first two actually parodied SCARY MOVIES for the most part.  can anyone tell me that they actually understood why there was an 8 mile parody in the preview?  its not like they tried to give you any idea how it ties into the 'story'.  its like, how many things can we recreate.  this movie makes me sick.

[Find Your Magali]

If nothing else, it means that 10 other equally insipid "parody" films will get green-lighted on Monday morning, in hopes of hitting the $50 million opening-weekend jackpot.

Maybe I should be concentrating on a Matrix/Texas Chainsaw Masscare/Radio parody as my first screenplay.  

[SHAFTR]

I haven't seen the movie but I did enjoy the trailer.

[Finn]

People really are idiots. I was in Mystic River and these was this women in front of me who acted like she was shocked every time an "f" word was said on screen. She gasped every single time, even though there were tons of them. Not only did it annoy and irritate me, but when I walked out of the theater, she said she would never go to an R rated movie again and that the movie was boring and not very good anyways. At that very moment, I felt like pulling a gun on her. I have those same kinds of experiences over and over again with the audience and I'm sick of it.

[Cecil]

in situations like this, you shout "fuck, that was a great FUCKING movie! fuck!" and laugh as she faints

[SHAFTR]

or...can you believe all that fuckin' language?

[Pedro]

in situations like this, you shout "fuck, that was a great FUCKING movie! fuck!" and laugh as she faints

[Banky]

In my theatre, every time a new spoof would start, you could hear many people in the audience go "Ohh this is Matrix" or "Isnt this Signs?"

That sucked ass.  I hate seeing PG 13 movies in thatres will all the little kids.

[Finn]

Yeah, I should've done that!

[Pozer]

I felt like pulling a gun on her.

whoa, whoa
easy there sideburns
only resort to this if they bring a crying baby
man, I want to murder the whole family when that happens
no winking smilie needed

[MacGuffin]

Dimension Films' Scary Movie 3 topped the box office for a second straight week, earning an estimated $21.1 million in its second weekend. The $45 million-budgeted comedy has brought in $78.6 million so far.

[Fernando]

David Zucker knows funny. Along with brother Jerry, he created the Airplane! and Naked Gun comedy franchises and totally reinvented satire for the screen. Instead of relying on the madcap antics that comics such as Mel Brooks had demonstrated before them, the Zucker brothers cast dramatic actors in outrageous situations, sending up the genre with a straight face. And so the modern spoof movie was born. You can almost hear the skeptics echoing the directors' own Airplane!: "Surely you can't be serious!" Oh, but they were serious -- that was the entire key to their new strategy (and don't call him "Shirley").

So where did David Zucker, who takes over for Damon Wayans in Scary Movie 3, find the inspiration for his approach to comedy? He borrowed a little bit from a lot of places, mixing lessons he'd learned from the most successful screen comics with his appreciation for more serious fare. When we asked him to fess up to his top five influences, he listed two Godfather movies, two Marx brothers movies, two Woody Allen movies and a funny-for-all-the-wrong-reasons "joke selection." We let him get away with it, because, frankly, seven is a much funnier number than five could ever be.

The Godfather: Parts I & II
(1972 & 1974; dir: Francis Ford Coppola, starring: Marlon Brando, Al Pacino)
There's not a week that goes by that I can't link some situation in my life to something in The Godfather I and II. Whether it's Sonny on the causeway, or don't go against the family, or the horse's head in the bed, it's a movie that really jumps the screen into people's lives. The scenes are so vivid and so evocative of the ways real families interact. For example, the way Marlon Brando goes over and over again what's going to happen with Michael. Knowing he's going to die soon, he says, "The one who comes to set up the meeting, that's the traitor." I've used that one before. Everything. There are so many great lines, every shot, the acting; it's brilliant how [Coppola] did everything about it. They stand far and above all other movies. Seeing it for the first time today, I don't know if you can appreciate [how innovative it was]. It's a lot like Airplane!, which is not to say that Airplane! is one of the greatest movies of all time, but it had never been done before. After 20 years of movie spoof, the experience now has to be lessened. You're not quite hit with the impact that it had when it came out, when people had never seen the thing with serious actors like Leslie Nielsen and Robert Stack being funny.

Bananas
(1971, dir: Woody Allen, starring: Woody Allen, Louise Lasser)
Bananas was a big, big influence on me. When I saw it, I think my reaction was, "Gee, I could do this, too." At the time, we were doing a live sketch comedy show on Pico Boulevard in L.A. called "Kentucky Fried Theater" hoping we could get into the movies. We named one of our shows "My Nose," just so our weekly listing in the L.A. Times would read, "'My Nose' runs continuously." That's how we made our living. I was thrilled to be making 200 bucks a week. Those were the days! Woody Allen used to make a movie a year, and I just couldn't wait until the next one came out because they were all great. Before Bananas, he had done What's Up, Tiger Lily? and Take the Money and Run, and this was his first really polished movie. It's about a guy who's in love with a girl. Hoping to impress her, he runs down to San Marcos and gets involved in one of those revolutions. At the end, he makes love to Louise Lasser while Howard Kossel does the play-by-play. That kind of humor was directly inspirational for my career. Stuff that wild had never been done before, smart satire and slapstick all in one.

Crimes and Misdemeanors
(1989, dir: Woody Allen, starring: Martin Landau, Jerry Orbach)
It's a movie about moral choices. Martin Landau is having an affair with Anjelica Huston, but she's threatening to disrupt his home life, so he goes to his brother for help. They decide to kill her and successfully commit the murder. I think Woody Allen was obsessed with how people can get away with great evil. That is a big moral question the movie is dealing with: Do you really get away with it, or does it motivate you to believe in an afterlife? If you don't believe in an afterlife, do you really think that Mother Theresa and Hitler end up at the same place? It's a profoundly challenging message, and I think Woody Allen does that in a lot of his movies. Whether they're successful or not, he tries to tackle some pretty hefty issues, and there aren't many movies that really do that anymore. This would be my choice for his best movie. It's open to many ways of interpretation. At the end, Sam Waterston is really the happiest character, and he's blind. I think Woody Allen puts things in juxtaposition and lets the viewers make their own choices, which also relates to the way Woody Allen does comedies. He gives the audience credit for some intelligence. He doesn't always point to the gag. What I've tried to do is let the audience find the gag without always being so obvious about it.

A Night at the Opera & Duck Soup
(1994, dir: Lee Tamahori, starring: Rena Owen, Temeura Morrison)
The Marx brothers' trademark was zany satire. They didn't do spoof as we know it now, but they were doing parody satire of movies and popular culture, and I love satire. By contrast, you have the Three Stooges. There wasn't anything really smart about the Three Stooges, although they were funny as far as they went with their slapstick head-bonking. But the Marx Brothers were a whole level above that. There wasn't an equal combination of smart and funny and satirical until Woody Allen. In their films, I like the polar opposites of A Night at the Opera and Duck Soup. They're essentially two sides of the same coin: A Night at the Opera was a great movie that held together because it had story, structure and characters, and Duck Soup, while it's probably their funniest movie, was more of a string of gags. We did the same thing with Airplane! and Top Secret. Airplane! really held together with a story and characters and was a really good movie, while Top Secret possibly had the funniest gags in it, but wasn't necessarily our best movie.

Midway
(1956, dir: John Ford, starring: John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter)
Another of my all-time favorite movies would have to be Midway. It's a World War II movie about the Battle of Midway. (I can't really imagine myself making a World War II movie. I was always a big fan of the book Catch-22, but I thought the movie was lousy, so I always wanted to remake it using all of Fox's footage of the planes and ships. Top Secret was sort of our stab at combining German World War II spy movies with Elvis movies, but I don't think people got it at the time.) Midway was mostly panned by the critics. One critic said it was called that because that was the point where the audience left. Maybe it's not such a great movie, but every time it's on TV, I just have to watch the whole thing. You can skip by all the personal touchy-feely stuff with Charlton Heston and his son and his son's girlfriend -- the obligatory drama -- but the battle stuff is really interesting because it's so complicated. It involves all these different aircraft carriers, both American and Japanese, plus all the different fighter squadrons. I end up trying to figure out which planes launched off which carriers and which of the Japanese admirals made which decisions. So every time I see it, I get another chance to make sense of it. Last time, it was 1 a.m. and my wife came downstairs and caught me watching Midway. She just did an eye-roll and walked back up the stairs.

[MacGuffin]

Superheroes Beware
Spoof kings David Zucker, Craig Mazin and Robert Weiss to tackle the superhero genre.

Comedy spoof king David Zucker, along with colleagues Craig Mazin and Robert Weiss, have expanded on their scary movie parodies, taking on new subjects in a film called Superhero!.

The same team that brought you Scary Movie 3 will riff on everyone from Spider-Man to Batman, with the Fantastic Four and X-Men thrown in for good measure. Zucker will take on directing duties, Mazin will write the script and Weiss will produce, with all three coming up with jokes.

The three were waiting for the release of a few more horror pix, such as The Ring 2, for fodder for Scary Movie 4 and came up with the superhero idea. This one will be tricky, since rights to the most popular superheroes are closely guarded. Superhero! will probably go into production next spring, even before Scary Movie 4.

[MacGuffin]

'Scary' Deal: Actress Faris Back for 4th Fright

Anna Faris is coming back for "Scary Movie 4."

The actress signed a deal in the low- to mid-seven figures, a career high, to star in the fourth installment of the popular Dimension Films spoof series. Faris and her character, Cindy Campbell, have appeared in all three of the "Scary" movies.

David Zucker, who directed the third installment, is returning to the helmer's chair. Craig Mazin and Pat Proft, who wrote the third installment, are writing the script.

The "Scary Movie" franchise has been a massive moneymaker for Dimension, Miramax Films' genre label. Domestically, the first movie grossed $157 million, the second $71.3 million, and the third, released in 2003, hit $110 million.

According to sources, Dimension head Bob Weinstein is expected to take an active role in the production, even though he and his brother, Harvey Weinstein, are in the midst of discussions with the Walt Disney Co. on the terms of Miramax's separation from the studio.