40,2 million dollars in three days, that's what Scary Movie 4 is talking about. Although that figure is a little bit less than Scary Movie 3 (48,1 million) and Scary Movie (42 million), it is still an amazing performance considering that this is the fourth installment. It's like a meal you really like that you eat again once in a while. But let's face it, Scary Movie is closer to Wendy's than to Alain Ducasse's restaurant.
Bad comparison, movies aren't like restaurants, they are all the same price and almost the same service is provided. Nobody cares about the projectionist the way they care about the chef. Sometimes I prefer the restaurant setting since you can negotiate with the waiter when you are not happy with your lobster while you can't tell Tarentino that you feel betrayed when you watch Kill Bill at the movie theatre. You can ask to have French beans instead of mash potatoes on the side, but you can't ask for Cate Blanchett instead of Reese Witherspoon as the lead.
But let's go back to scary movies which are not scary anymore because they have widened their range of victims. It is said that Scary Movie 4 makes fun of a lot of other movies that are not scary at all. I suppose they realised that nobody likes horror movies so instead they should make fun of Brokeback Mountain because nobody has made fun of it before. No, I am kidding, I know people go to horror movies, I just hate them, they make me remember the first time I saw Jurassic Park. I was 11 or something and I really thought that raptors were hiding behind the door to my room.
Like raptors, the Scary Movie series can adapt to new environments. They used to parody horror films and now they parody any film that has had a huge success. It is pure genius! Even if they only steal 2 percent of the spectators who watched one of the movies they are parodying, it is still 2 percent of a blockbuster, which means hundreds of thousands of people. In essence the backbone of their movie is a list of movies from the previous year. They have invented the "spectator recycling."
Spectator recycling is like plastic or aluminium recycling. You take a used spectator that can't see Titanic anymore, and you make him watch a funny Titanic where Di Caprio is not Di Caprio, and where the fake Kate Winslet walks on a banana and falls overboard (HaHaHa). Like an old toothpaste tube, the Scary Movie creators have shown that there is always a little bit left.
