Even before this past summer’s reboot made it to theaters, the original’s creator and director, David Zucker, expressed skepticism when it came to the update, starring Liam Neeson, by saying he was “not excited.”
Turns out, Zucker did finally catch the reboot and, to the shock of absolutely nobody, didn’t enjoy it at all, confessing that MacFarlane’s installment “totally missed” the mark and blaming the big budget.
“My brother, Jerry, and our partner, Jim Abrahams, started doing spoof comedies 50 years ago, and we originated our own style—and we did that so well that it looks easy, evidently,” he explained to Woman’s World. “People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new Naked Gun. He totally missed it.”
Zucker noted that, alongside brother Jerry and Jim Abrahams, they had found “a certain method to the madness” with their 1988 spoof starring Leslie Nielsen.
We had our 15 rules, and I’m teaching them in the hopes that if anybody tries to do a movie like this again, they’ll do it right. You shouldn’t spend too much money on comedies, and one of our rules is about technical pizzazz. Big budgets and comedy are opposites, and in the new Naked Gun, you could see that they spent a lot of money on scenes full of technical pizzazz while trying to copy our style.
What’s ironic about Zucker’s comments is that the 1988 original cost $12M at the time, which translates to around $33M today. The reboot actually didn’t cost that much more, with a reported $40M budget.
Zucker’s panning of the Neeson-starring reboot shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Last year, he stated that it came as a bit of a shock when Paramount handed the franchise to a totally different set of creatives. You see, Zucker was originally under the impression that Paramount was going to greenlight his own “Naked Gun” reboot—this one riffing on “James Bond” and “Mission: Impossible”—only to later find out they greenlit MacFarlane’s without his knowledge.
The reboot was released in August to praise (88% on RT) and made decent dough at the box office ($102M worldwide). There might be a sequel. Meanwhile, Zucker hasn’t written or directed a film since 2001’s “Rat Race.”