"Meanwhile, clinging to the edge of the top ten was Marlon Wayans' "Fifty Shades Of Black" with $6 million. It's the worst opening for any of the parody movies Wayans has made, and perhaps suggests a waning audience interest in this particular brand of comedy."
$6 million is terrible for a wide release.
Contrary to it saying it was made for 20 million. It's reportedly only been made for about 5-6 million.. So it's not a disaster but it shows people are tired of these types of films. I was rooting for Marlon after A Haunted House cause it was kinda funny but the Wayans keep beating a dead horse with this genre... The trailer did not look remotely funny at all..
shareYou add half the budget generally for marketing costs. Even if it's not a bomb it's still a fat waste of time. Studios don't invest that much time and money into a project to make a few or barely break even.
Good to see bad parody films get put at the bottom of the box office list.
wow, this was shown in theatres?
shareHonestly I find it embarrassing that it even broke the top 10.
Think about it. People actually paid to see this in a theater.
Anyone still remember the times when they actually released genuinely funny and even classic movie spoofs like 'Airplane!'? Heck I even think movies like 'The Cheap Detective' and Mel Brooks 'High Anxiety' are still pretty damn funny movie spoofs. But nowadays we get utter crap like this? My how the mighty movie spoof has completely fallen!
"Life IS pain highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something".
i watch airplane at least once a year. when it comes to spoofs it does not get any better than that. the naked gun series is also pretty neat. when it comes to horror spoofs, student bodies still is the one to beat.
shareOh damn I love Student Bodies too! I was just commenting the other day on how superior it is to all the Scary Movies and both Haunted House 'spoofs'(all coincidentally, or not, made by The Wayans Bros. as well).
"Life IS pain highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something".
i could not agree more. i think the difference is that the guys who did student bodies actually for once loved the genre itself and therefore on the one hand had much more knowledge about all the repetitions and cliches that are actually worth spoofing. with all those good spoof, they put in so many gags that some of those going on in the background, you would only see at watching the film for the 3rd or 4th time. furthermore they have put more effort into it. those gags were so good, that one would repeat and recreate them with fellow fans for weeks. for example even years and years later, if someone starts to chuckle about the term "horse head bookends", you instantly know why he's chuckling.
another problem with this gen's lame spoofs is that they are so unfocussed, most likely because there are so many of them, well apart from the obvious lazyness. they try to cover too much ground. airplane, naked gun, student bodies, they very much focussed on a certain genre and disected each and every aspect of it. student bodies for example focussed specifically slasher movies. if you do that, well then you are able to make that into one cohesive spoof film. if you look at the scary movie series for example, they just take everything that has the term horror on it, throw that into a blender , add some slapstick und some cheap grossness and finished is the next installment. you got saw, then you got a slasher movie, then a ghost movie, then this, then this ... no wonder it's not cohesive. to make things worse, they fill that void with pop culture reference, which is just lazy and takes away from the jokes even more. if one watches this crap 5 years from now, would one really crack up because of a backstreet boys reference? i doubt it.
i know that the makers of airplane were involved into some of those abysmal new school spoofs, but always only 1 or 2 of them. they did their best work, when there were all 3. zucker, abrahams, zucker. back in the days, even as one of them dropped out, they started to decline in quality. hot shots for example was alright, but no competition to their previous work.
You make excellent points regarding the reasons as to why one horror movie spoof is able to work and why the other one(s) completely fails. And I always remember that scene in Student Bodies towards the end when Toby is running through the school halls and encounters many of the movie's previously seen characters in quite bizarre fashions. This scene really succeeds in eliciting both laughs AND a certain unnerving, and even somewhat frightening, reaction from the audience. To me this scene was actually very clever and imaginative in it's distortion of so much that came before it. This is something that The Wayans Bros. horror spoofs would NEVER have featured simply because none of them, with their simplistic and in-your-face 'humor', could ever conceive of a scene with such a wonderfully macabre and off-kilter atmosphere to it as the one in Student Bodies does.
"Life IS pain highness. Anyone who says differently is selling something".
thank you.
very good points as well. :D