The first decade of this century was a time of great change, marked by terrorism and recession, as well as a digital revolution in communication and entertainment. Film studios wanted maximum profits while audiences just wanted to laugh. What they got was a long succession of mostly cheap parodies. Here’s why 2000s parody movies were so popular, and why we’ll never see them again.
A Long Tradition
DreamWorks Pictures
Though the 2000s saw the release of many parody movies, it was just a continuation of a long tradition. It’s important to note that parody is not quite the same as satire, though there is an enduring history of both in film. While satire targets a larger real-world issue (not always with humor), a parody film or “spoof” lampoons another movie or genre with comic exaggeration. The difference is not always clear, and some films employ both techniques, but among the earliest that is obviously a parody is 1905’s The Little Train Robbery, which takes the premise of the classic The Great Train Robbery from two years earlier, but uses a cast of all children.
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Many consider the “golden age” of parody movies to be the 1970s and 80s, led by Mel Brooks and the ZAZ (David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker) trio. While Dr. Demento and Weird Al were beginning to make parody popular on radio, Brooks started the trend in film in 1974 with the release of both Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, and later added Spaceballs in 1987. ZAZ first found some success with 1977’s The Kentucky Fried Movie, but their big hit was Airplane! in 1980, still considered one of the funniest parody movies ever made. In addition to a sequel, it paved the way for 1984’s Top Secret! and The Naked Gun in 1988 (which itself spawned two sequels), as well as Hot Shots! and its sequel in the early 1990s. But by then the three partners had gone their separate ways.
Indeed, the rise of computer graphics and the popularity of summer blockbuster disaster movies in the mid and late 1990s meant far fewer parody releases, though two successes are notable. First is Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Mike Myers’ 1997 spoof of James Bond, which slowly grew a large following, especially after its home video release, and turned into a trilogy. The other is Galaxy Quest, which could be considered the start of the 2000s parody revival, as it was released on Christmas Day 1999, enjoying most of its run in early 2000. The movie is clearly a parody of the Star Trek franchise but also satirizes obsessive fan culture.
Cheap Laughs
Dimension Films
Another force in entertainment was growing in the late 1990s: reality television. MTV pioneered The Real World in the US, while other franchises got their starts in Europe, eventually emerging as international hits Survivor, American Idol, and Big Brother. What executives especially liked was that such series could be produced for far less money than traditionally scripted shows. Movie studios wanted something similar.
They found it in the Wayans brothers’ Scary Movie in 2000. With a modest budget of about 19 million dollars, the movie went on to gross some $278 million at the worldwide box office. Ironically, Scary Movie was based primarily on 1996’s Scream, which some consider a parody itself. Despite mixed reviews, the movie’s massive success meant that a sequel was rushed into production.
With the same director and many returning cast members, Scary Movie 2 was released less than a year later and made more than $140 million. While that was half the grosses of the original, the movie was still hugely profitable, and 3 more sequels followed. The year 2001 also saw Not Another Teen Movie help launch Chris Evans’ career. Other Hollywood studios jumped on the bandwagon, and audiences got a seemingly never-ending series of genre spoofs: Date Movie, Epic Movie, Meet the Spartans, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck, among them, all from filmmakers Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer.
Comic Relief
While studios enjoyed relatively cheap laughs, viewers just wanted some comic relief. The 9/11 attacks in 2001 signaled a new era of terrorism fears and drawn-out wars that would continue long after. If that wasn’t enough, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008 revealed a subprime mortgage crisis that would spiral into the Great Recession to end the decade. Audiences had always turned to the movies to escape real-world difficulties, and the 2000s were no different. There were some interesting and unique releases from which to choose, including Disney’s 2007 Enchanted, exploring the clash between its own animated fairy tale naivety and the real world, and boundary-pushing war movie-within-a-movie Tropic Thunder in 2008.
But with so many spoofs, it was a case of diminishing returns. Reviews for pictures like Superhero Movie in 2008 and Dance Flick in 2009 were abysmal, and similar movies began getting limited theater runs. The 2010 release of a movie titled The 41-Year-Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It made it obvious that parodies now lacked creativity, originality, and most importantly, comedy. Oversaturation eventually tired even die-hard fans. The popular parody revival of the 2000s was over. Comic book movies and geek culture were on the rise, but there were more fundamental forces at work that were permanently changing show business.
Moving Online
Comedy Bang! Bang! / Funny or Die
YouTube first launched in early 2005, but it took some time for its potential to be realized. Over the next few years, the increasing availability of affordable quality digital cameras (and later smartphones) for shooting and computers for editing, along with ubiquitous high-speed Internet access, allowed a new generation of creators to offer their own parodies to the public. This was not new (see 1978’s Hardware Wars), but it was much more widespread. Anyone could make a parody, and potentially millions of viewers would see it.
And even for traditional studios, digital distribution was the future. Netflix had been mailing DVDs to people since 1997 but started streaming in 2007, eventually going entirely digital and producing programming itself. The year 2007 also saw John C. Reilly’s underrated musical biopic parody Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story bomb in theaters, while his longtime collaborators Will Ferrell and Adam McKay launched Funny or Die, a successful website featuring comedy video content like Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis.
Nothing to Spoof
Universal Pictures
At the same time that digital platforms were revolutionizing the entertainment business, America and the world were becoming more politically polarized and divided. How could a studio release a mainstream parody movie when audiences no longer agreed on what was funny? Conservatives made Fox News and its nighttime entertainment hugely profitable, while progressive audiences increasingly turned to television like The Daily Show for their laughs. Culture continues to change, and jokes that were funny to many even a few years ago are no longer acceptable. Blockbuster movies have to please both diverse international audiences and the Chinese government, and there are fewer comedy releases as a result.
It doesn’t help that movies have unintentionally become parodies of themselves. While The Fast and the Furious was a 2001 film centered on truck hijacking and street racing, the numerous sequels have found the growing cast in increasingly ridiculous situations, including piloting submarines, handling nuclear weapons, and even launching a car into space. How do you spoof that?
The answer, at least for some movies, is to openly embrace parody. In many ways, 2016’s Deadpool was a parody of the superhero genre, and yet it managed to be a popular superhero movie itself. This is likely the future for parody on the big screen for now: not the string of genre spoofs we got in the 2000s, but movies that aren’t afraid to break the fourth wall and wink at the audience. Then again, maybe a new parody film will be so well-written, so funny to so many people, that it will become a big hit and start a new golden age. Surely I can’t be serious? I am serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
