There are patterns in the way movies are presented to their audiences. Films are subject to the trends of the era and creative influences of whoever wrote the script. Add in a dash of executive meddling to shave down the rough edges and one can usually approach a movie with a genre Bingo card of things they expect to happen.
Parody movies have long existed to lampoon such patterns that are found in these movies. They’re a source of a lot of fun, but also serve to point out the consistency of these patterns across multiple movies, almost like a clarion call against the homogenization of the theater experience. Lately, however, there seems to be a lack of parody movies made to call out these patterns. Why is that?
Today cinema is booming like it never has been before. This means that, in this slew of content to watch, the patterns likely stick out and become even more obvious. Yet, the duty of pointing out these recurrent tropes seems to fall on individual episodes of cheeky TV shows.
Mel Brooks has a long and storied career of amazing comedy films, many of which satirize fame and the film industry like Silent Movie and The Producers. While these movies may make liberal use of meta-humor, some of his work has also been firmly in the territory of parody, like Young Frankenstein, Spaceballs, and Robin Hood: Men in Tights.
One of the most prominent parody movies is the 1980 film Airplane!, a ridiculous serve-up of the conventions of the disaster films of yesteryear. It’s a movie that has been not only a financial and critical success but has also been selected for preservation in the National Film Registry for its cultural significance. While the movie’s plot and structure are very heavily influenced by the 1957 film Zero Hour!, it takes on a life of its own while poking fun at a variety of films and then-current events all while refusing to take itself seriously for even a moment. Leslie Nielsen would follow up his success as a comedic actor in Airplane! with the Naked Gun series, the first of which is also highly regarded in the pantheon of the comedy genre.
1991’s Hot Shots! and to a lesser extent its 1993 sequel Hot Shots! Part Deux were successes, parodying a variety of films but with plots more closely mirroring Top Gun (which has a sequel scheduled for release next year) and Rambo: First Blood Part II, respectively. Scary Movie would become a hit at box offices and result in 4 sequels and the careers of the Friedberg and Seltzer comedy team.
Friedberg and Seltzer are a somewhat notorious writing duo when it comes to parody films. After writing Spy Hard and Scary Movie, they would begin directing their scripts, pumping out the films Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck. Critical reactions to these movies were almost universally negative but the movies all made large earnings at the box office comparative to their meager budgets. The plots followed beat-for-beat those of recent major hits while throwing in references to other blockbuster films of that year, usually amounting to nothing more than the main character appearing, being called out by name, and then being flattened by a cow or some other large object.
Ever since the Seltzer and Friedberg duo dominated the market for parody movies, the number of films explicitly released as parody movies has petered out. Some films, like Hot Fuzz, changed the paradigm, serving as loving tributes to the films that inspired them. Characters in the movie describe their love for specific films of the genre, while still being allowing it to be its own movie.
Other parody movies either didn’t see large releases or went largely unnoticed. 2007’s Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story has a plot and title that are very much inspired by Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line released two years prior, but still has plenty of its own unique personality and a story that diverges wildly from its source, managing to parody a plethora of musician biopics including some that weren’t even made yet. The movie would fail at the box office but would go on to be considered a cult-classic.
Has the number of parody movies actually dwindled, or have they merely failed to capture the box office and audiences like earlier works? Recent parody films like Superfast! (another Seltzer and Friedburg production), Fifty Shades of Black, and Holmes & Watson have all failed to elicit excitement from viewers and critics alike, and others like Notzilla have seen extremely limited release. It can seem like the genre of parody movies has seen its last days.
Perhaps another reason for the apparent scarcity of parody movies is a matter of nomenclature. Does a movie need to explicitly pantomime another movie and wink at audiences during its runtime to qualify as parody? Arguably, a genre movie that plays its tropes straight doesn’t become a parody movie if the tone is comedic rather than dramatic. A parody movie needs to have a subject to mock so intention becomes important, because while a parody movie in a way needs to have a metatextual sense to it, a movie containing meta-humor is not necessarily a parody.
Maybe parody movies themselves were becoming too formulaic. Somebody probably has a second draft for a script of “Parody Movie” sitting on a hard drive somewhere in need of a few key edits. Movies like Galaxy Quest, Team America: World Police, and They Came Together manage to lampoon the conventions of their target genre while also being their own films. Like other send-ups of the horror genre, Cabin in the Woods straddles the line of both making fun of the horror genre while playing into the formula at the same time, having its cake and eating it too and going on to be regarded as a classic of the genre, much like what happened with Scream. What We Do In the Shadows has also become a similarly successful parody of the vampire genre, spawning a delightful TV series.
What if parody films are evolving, breaking out of the idea that to successfully be a parody they have to mimic something else? There have been plenty of recent works that have been more of a humorous pastiche than simple mockery. Perhaps the new version of the parody film is merely harder to quantify as just strictly parody.
Or, perhaps, a singularity-type event of popular culture has arrived and every trope has been not only done, but done to death, to the point where no trope can be played straight without eliciting eye rolls and groans. Maybe the only way to write a surprising and engaging story today is to intentionally be frictional with conventions of the genre, becoming almost parodic while somehow not being parody, making satire of it pointless until doing such a thing itself becomes a trope.
Parody is, if anything, an arms race against the mainstream. Scream was a horror movie that itself mocked horror movies. Then Scary Movie mocked Scream, and later Scream films would subsequently go on to mock both Scary Movie and Scream. After a certain point, the notion of staying relevant and hip enough to trends to be able to parody them becomes like trying to navigate oneself up the stairs in an M. C. Escher drawing.
Still, with the stranglehold on the theater market that superhero movies have, one would think that there would be some sort of recent release finally giving the genre its day under the microscope. Maybe Deadpool was just that, or maybe it didn’t go far enough. No matter what, there will never be lack of source material primed and ready for somebody to give it a thorough takedown.
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