The Wayans brothers are back — and audiences in Britain turned up to prove they never really left. Paramount’s Scary Movie, the sixth instalment of the horror-parody franchise and the first to reunite original creators Marlon and Shawn Wayans with the cast they built it with, opened to £4.1 million ($5.6 million) in the U.K. and Ireland to claim the top spot in the region.
The result mirrors an emphatic global performance: the film posted a franchise-best $105.5 million worldwide in its opening weekend, including $55 million domestically — more than any Scary Movie film has ever managed in its entire theatrical run.
Shot against a reported $30 million budget, the film is essentially instantly profitable for Paramount. It reunites Marlon and Shawn Wayans alongside original stars Anna Faris and Regina Hall, and takes aim at a wide range of recent horror films and cultural moments, including Scream, Smile, M3GAN, Terrifier, Get Out, and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, stretching into broader satire of Wicked, livestreaming, politics, and pandemic-era culture. Critics were largely unmoved, but the film’s commercial logic was always rooted elsewhere. The franchise has never been a critical favourite; the sweet spot right now is late-1990s and early-2000s nostalgia.
Piece of Magic Entertainment’s The Amazing Digital Circus: The Last Act debuted in second place at $3.6 million, while Sony’s fantasy epic Masters of the Universe opened in third with $3.5 million. A24’s Backrooms moved to fourth in its second weekend, adding $3 million to a cumulative haul of $11.6 million.
The more consequential battle for the U.K. market begins this week. Universal’s Disclosure Day, directed by Steven Spielberg, opens on Wednesday June 11 across more than 300 locations. The $115 million science-fiction film — written by David Koepp from a Spielberg story, with a score by John Williams — stars Emily Blunt as a Kansas City meteorologist alongside Josh O’Connor, Colin Firth, Eve Hewson, and Colman Domingo. Its promotional tagline — “If you found out we weren’t alone … the truth belongs to seven billion people” — frames a story about the global reckoning that follows proof of extraterrestrial life. Early press reactions have been striking: reviewers who saw the film ahead of its release called it “Spielberg’s best film in 20 years,” with particular praise for Blunt’s performance. Spielberg previously worked within the alien genre on E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the 2005 adaptation of War of the Worlds.
Meanwhile, industry analysts are already calculating what a Scary Movie sequel looks like, noting the film will likely outgross several recent studio tentpoles on a fraction of their budgets. With Disclosure Day set to test whether Spielberg can reclaim his commercial peak in the same summer, the coming fortnight will tell a great deal about which kind of cinema British audiences are currently willing to reward.
