Today, comedy movies are so rare on the big screen that it’s not really surprising that spoof movies are also scarce in the theatrical cinema landscape. But even in the years leading up to events like the COVID-19 pandemic and the dwindling of theatrical comedies, spoof films were hard to come by. Once the domain of acclaimed comedic auteurs like Mel Brooks, the spoof movie has largely vanished from the pop culture landscape. Classic entries in the genre still spawn GIFs and appreciative retrospective reviews to this very day, but modern-day successors to the likes of Scary Movie and Blazing Saddles are impossible to uncover.
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This is an especially fascinating turn of events given just how ubiquitous these titles were for so long. There was once an era where it was impossible to find a year that didn’t contain a handful of spoof movies attempting to skewer the biggest motion pictures of recent years. What happened? How did the spoof movie go from being a comedy cinema titan to slipping on a banana peel and into the manhole of obscurity? As usual, whenever any genre goes missing from movie theaters, there are lots of reasons why the spoof movie has become an artifact of a bygone era.

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What Do We Have Fewer Spoof Movies?
Image via Dimension Films

The 1990s saw a steady stream of spoof movies, many of them headlined by Leslie Nielsen in an attempt to evoke nostalgia for the 1970s spoof classic Airplane! But the genre reached new box office heights with the success of Scary Movie in the year 2000. A massive box office hit, this parody of horror films ushered in a new era of spoof cinema. Ironically, with the benefit of hindsight, the original Scary Movie also started the demise of this genre. Though it spawned multiple lucrative sequels, Scary Movie also inspired imitators that would end up giving this type of humorous cinema a bad name.

Two of the credited writers on this project were Aaron Seltzer and Jason Friedberg. This pair would later graduate to the status of writer/directors on mid-2000s spoof movies like Date Movie and Epic Movie. Studios loved the duo for getting spoof movies done quickly, efficiently, and profitably. Everybody else despised their work for being cheap and crass. Their creative output reached a new low in 2008 with Disaster Movie, which lampooned various major 2008 motion pictures that weren’t even released when this spoof film was shooting. The days of Airplane! seemed to be firmly in the rearview now that spoof movies were just skewering images and frames from the Tropic Thunder trailer.

Though the Seltzer and Friedberg style of spoof movies made some quick cash for producers and movie studios, they ushed in a new terrible reputation for the spoof film. A strain of cinema that was already known for being home to derided cash grabs (hello Mafia!) was now the domain of even worse motion pictures like Meet the Spartans. There was no question that these types of comedies were now the nadir of mainstream cinema. Eventually, even audiences seemed to get sick of these productions. After Vampires Suck, Seltzer and Friedberg directed two more spoof movies that went direct to home video. Most other entries in the genre, like The Hungover Games, also went straight to the Big Lots bargain DVD bin.

By the time Scary Movie 5 tried to milk some final dollars from especially susceptible moviegoers, there was no interest. That feature bombed and signaled that the box office renaissance for spoof movies was well and truly finished.

What Else Led to the Spoof Movie Decline?
Image via 20th Century Fox

It wasn’t just the poor quality of spoof movies that led to this genre dying out, though. After all, plenty of bad films still spawn sequels and box office success. Additional problems have ensured the death of the spoof comedy. One key problem is a factor that’s always critical to jokes: timing. The final Seltzer and Friedberg spoof films came out just as Twitter was taking off. In the process, a new instantaneous way to comment on pop culture developments or famous movie moments was born. The moment Jesse Eisenberg got cast as Lex Luthor in Batman v. Superman: Dawn of Justice, for example, everybody made “Social Network/Lex Luthor” jokes on Twitter and similar social media platforms. How can a spoof film compete with that kind of immediate satire?

Meanwhile, pop culture has become dominated more and more by niche material thanks to the ubiquity of streaming platforms and other pop culture trends. Scary Movie 3 in 2003 had an entire sequence skewering American Idol, complete with a Simon Cowell cameo. Save for maybe Yellowstone, it’s hard to imagine a similar TV show a modern spoof movie could lampoon that would get yuks out of audiences far and wide. This isn’t an entirely bad situation, as it’s hard to imagine cult hits like Sorry to Bother You being able to get financing back in 2003. The evolution of pop culture is always full of upsides and downsides, with one drawback just being that, with so much stuff getting made now, there are fewer movie and TV shows that become big enough cultural events to function as perfect crowdpleaser spoof movie material.

Then, of course, there’s the simple fact that Hollywood has just slowed down the production of comedies in general to a trickle. Once a staple of every studio’s slate, comedies are now a rare sight on the big screen. With just general yukfests struggling to get financing and distribution, it’s no wonder that the spoof comedy subgenre has become especially rare. Plus, the negative aura surrounding this style of comedy has been impossible to shake off. Who wants to enter a world of filmmaking that conjures up memories of Meet the Spartans rather than Young Frankenstein?

Don’t Expect a Spoof Movie Resurgence Anytime Soon
Image via Sony/Columbia Pictures

Normally, it wouldn’t seem impossible for any movie genre to come back from the grave, no matter how tormented it might seem. In the case of the spoof comedy, though, it just doesn’t seem likely that audiences will be lining up to see a modern equivalent to Scary Movie anytime soon. If people want satirical takes on the ludicrous aspects of mainstream entertainment, there are plenty of YouTube sketches, TikTok shorts, and sarcastic tweets to fulfill that need. Studios don’t need to invest $30+ million into a 2023 version of Date Movie when something like the Pitch Meeting series exists online to lampoon major blockbusters. A feature like The Blackening is the closest modern audiences can expect to getting a 2023 spoof movie on the big screen and even that one is more concerned with skewering broader genre tropes rather than one specific movie.

That status quo is a shame in some respects since the greatest spoof movies show a way to create not only great laughs but also solid filmmaking. The best works of Mel Brooks or the 2007 masterpiece Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, for instance, are hysterical and even surpass many of the original motion pictures they’re skewering in overall quality. There’s still potential in the world of spoof movies, but the landscape of cinematic comedies doesn’t make it likely any of that potential will be exploited anytime soon.