Er, this one all sounds a little bit daft to us. The first Scary Movie film was a good, solid spoof of the Scream movies, which were in turn a riff on umpteen slasher films in their own right. It reminds us of when National Lampoon's Loaded Weapon 1 came out as a spoof of the Lethal Weapons, leading to Mel Gibson asking just how do you parody a parody?

In the case of the first Scary Movie, quite well was the answer. In the case of the second, third and fourth films? Not well at all, as the films ran out of steam fasting than Police Academy movies used to. That said, the fourth Scary Movie still raked in the best part of $200m at the box office, and we just assumed from that point that a Scary Movie 5 would be on its way.

It seems that it is, and it isn't. There are plans afoot, reports Cinema Blend, for a fifth Scary Movie film, but that the Weinstein Company will be rebooting the franchise.

Rebooting Scary Movie? Has the world gone nuts? We can understand rebooting a big franchise, or trying something different with a comic book adaptation or something. But the Scary Movie films were what they were: there were no big franchise ideals to go back to the roots of. Instead, they've just taken the piss out of whatever horror and related movies they can find. What next? Will we see an Alvin And The Chipmunks reboot in a few years or something?

Cinema Blend reports that the next Scary Movie film will not feature Anna Faris, the one constant of the series thus far, and will kick off with new characters. Not that we can remember the name of a single character from the first four films, but we'll gloss over that.

The new Scary Movie won't jump ahead of Scream on the Weinstein production slate though, with Scream 4 currently scheduled for 2010. Once that's done and dusted, then the attention will no doubt turn to Scary Movie. Hurray!

The Cinema Blend story is here.