Marlon Wayans Says That Comedy Movies Will Make A Comeback
Horror, your days are numbered — comedy is just a phone call away.
In the early aughts, you couldn’t walk past a movie theater without catching a glimpse of Marlon Wayans and/or one of his famous siblings on the promotional poster of an upcoming comedy wearing an outrageous costume and making a face that’s somewhere between seeing a ghost and smelling a fart. The aughts were a golden age for mid-budget comedies that critics hated but audiences embraced for such strong box office performances that the films spawned at least a half-dozen sequels of steadily diminishing entertainment value over the following decade.
Today, sadly, pure comedy films are few and far between, and none of them are making enough money to convince their studios to turn them into franchises with annual installments. At some point in the last 20 years, America lost its taste for hastily produced and shamelessly silly parodies.
Surprisingly, this downturn in the comedy film industry doesn’t worry one of its most successful champions, and the Scary Movie co-writer and co-star believes that we’re overdue for another comedy craze at movie theaters. In a recent interview with The New York Times, Wayans said that, while he doesn’t know exactly when movie studios will fully embrace comedies again, “I’m very patient, because I know everything is cyclical.”
Imagine the level of white-face he could pull off with today’s deep-fake technology.
“If you look at Hollywood, for the past 10 years, there hasn’t been a lot of comedies,” Wayans admitted in the interview. “Because Hollywood — they were chasing the superhero. They were chasing the blockbuster.”
Though the Marvel Cinematic Universe has yet to tap the Wayans family for any of the third-or-fourth-tier superhero roles in the current generation of cape schlock, Wayans insisted that the powers that be will be in touch, predicting, “They’re going to make comedies again. But the people that’s going to make the comedies are the people that know how to make the comedies.”
Seeing as Wayans has acted in 21 different comedy films and written on almost as many, he believes that he’s uniquely situated to take advantage of the upcoming comedy renaissance, and, just as it was during his original heyday, his resurgence will be a family affair. Wayans said of the rudderless film executives who still haven’t figured out the secret formula for comedy success, “They keep trying to make, like, Scary Movie. The audience is like, ‘That don’t taste like the Wayans; I’m not going.’ Because they know we know how to tell these jokes. This is a family recipe that we’ve had. You can’t replicate what we do. You can have all the seasonings. You don’t know how much to put on it.”
The rest of us might not know the perfect ratio of humor herbs and spices to make a comedy hit, but Wayans should have double-checked the recipe when he cooked up The Curse of Bridge Hollow.
