Marlon Wayans Claps Back at ‘Scary Movie 6’ Critics and Reminds Everyone ‘White Chicks’ Is Untouchable
The gap between what critics think and what audiences feel has always been a fault line running through Hollywood comedy, and few filmmakers have lived on that fault line longer than Marlon Wayans. For over two decades, the comedian and filmmaker has built a body of work that reviewers have routinely dismissed while fans have turned the films into something closer to cultural institutions. That tension is flaring up again in a very public way, and this time Wayans is not staying quiet about it.
‘Scary Movie 6’ arrived in theaters on June 5, 2026, continuing the long-running horror satire series after a 13-year absence from the big screen. The comeback generated plenty of audience enthusiasm, but critics were far less welcoming. The film landed at a 26% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer, a score that is low but not entirely out of step with the franchise’s history, given that entries like ‘Scary Movie 2’ sit at 13% and ‘Scary Movie 5’ bottomed out at a staggering 4%.
Rather than brush the reviews aside privately, Wayans took the conversation directly to social media, and the response was immediate. He shared a pointed statement alongside Rotten Tomatoes scores for his past films, writing that “we don’t make movies for the critics, we make movies for the people who want to laugh and have fun,” before adding that ‘White Chicks’ has a 15% on the site and calling it “an amazing job” before declaring that “all these movies are classics.” It was a defiant and unambiguous message from someone who has heard this particular criticism many times before.
This is not the first time Wayans has pushed back against the critic-versus-audience divide. When responding to negative reviews for the Jordan Peele-produced horror-thriller ‘Him’ last year, he posted a carousel of Rotten Tomatoes scores for past films on Instagram, making the case that a majority of his cult classics have received reappraisal over time. In that post he wrote that he respects critics and acknowledges their role in shaping the industry, but insisted that “an opinion does not always mean it’s everyone’s opinion.”
The audience data does seem to support his argument, at least partly. While ‘Scary Movie 6’ holds a 27% critical score, its audience score tells a very different story, sitting at 71% after more than 1,000 verified reviews. The film also set an all-time franchise record at the box office, opening to 56 million dollars, the best debut in the 26 years since the series began, surpassing the previous record held by ‘Scary Movie 3’ at 49.7 million. That kind of commercial result makes it difficult to argue that audiences are not responding.
Fan response in the comments largely backed Wayans up, with one writing that ‘White Chicks’ is “an unmatched cinematic masterpiece that people will still be talking about in 50 years,” while another acknowledged that while the disrespect to ‘White Chicks’ is unwarranted, ‘Scary Movie 6’ did have genuine problems. The split reaction reflects exactly the kind of nuanced fandom that Wayans has cultivated over the years, one that loves the films fiercely even while holding them to some standard of quality.
The original ‘White Chicks,’ in which Marlon and Shawn Wayans played FBI agents going undercover as white socialites, was trashed by critics on release but earned over 113 million dollars worldwide, and its cultural footprint has only grown since. Wayans has confirmed that ‘White Chicks 2’ is his next planned project, contingent on ‘Scary Movie 6’ performing well at the box office. Given that opening weekend, it appears that sequel may be closer than ever.
Whether critics ever come around on the Wayans catalog is almost beside the point now. The numbers, the fan loyalty, and Marlon’s increasingly vocal defense of his own legacy suggest this is a filmmaker who has decided the scoreboard is the audience, not the Tomatometer. What do you think, are ‘White Chicks’ and the original ‘Scary Movie’ the misunderstood classics Marlon says they are, or do the critical scores tell a more honest story?
