Original 'Naked Gun' director offers his reasons for skipping Liam Neeson reboot
In an interview with Fox News Digital, filmmaker David Zucker declared that he would not be watching "The Naked Gun" starring Liam Neeson, stating the entire concept of a "Naked Gun" reboot was unoriginal and played out.
"I don't see any reason to see it," he said.
"And so, it's like, well, Jim Abrahams said, if your daughter became a prostitute, would you go watch her work?" Zucker said elsewhere, quoting the late co-director of "Airplane!", another classic comedy Zucker co-directed.
The director clarified that, despite his harsh view of 2025's "Naked Gun" reboot, he bears no ill will towards the film's cast and crew, like Neeson, or producer Seth MacFarlane – the creator of "Family Guy."
"So, Seth MacFarlane came in. He's a big, successful producer, and he came in with a big star, Liam Neeson. I don't have anything against Liam Neeson. I think he's a wonderful actor. He is a fine actor, but generally for spoof, you don't really need that," he said.
"Plus, the way I approach movies is not to do the same thing over again. I didn't even want to do 'Naked Gun 3.' And so, somebody else directed it. I produced it while I was writing another movie."
Zucker stressed that he would have done "something new" with another "Naked Gun" rather than repackage his original idea. The director said that prior to Paramount Global greenlighting the Neeson "Naked Gun" he workshopped potential ideas for a "Naked Gun 4." They included a storyline involving the son of police detective Frank Drebin (played by actor Leslie Nielsen in the original) as a spy.
"[What] Pat and Mike and I worked on for a year was to have Drebin's son, but really his young son, a 30-year-old, and not an LA cop scenario – but a 'Mission Impossible,' James Bond, 'Bourne Identity' international spoof, international spy thriller. So, I always have wanted to do something new," he said.
Zucker also told Fox News Digital that he doesn't want to give people the impression he's calling for a boycott of the reboot, calling out media reports that have made it seem that way.
"I read things where it says, 'David Zucker is leading a boycott.' I'm not leading a [boycott] – all I said was that I have no interest in seeing it." He made sure to note that the new film's director, Akiva Schaffer, is "a super nice guy" who, along with MacFarlane, asked Zucker in vain for advice on the film.
"But there's nothing I can do to help them because it's not what I would have done," he declared.
Elsewhere, he said, "I think the whole thing is wrong, because that's not how I would do movies. I don't want to copy someone else's work."
Zucker told Fox News Digital that he believes that the entire film industry is suffering from this lack of originality.
"Now it's all about – you know, the studio executives, for the most part, are frightened. And so that's why all you have now is, you know, big stars, superhero movies, big special effects, Tom Cruise movies," he said, though he clarified he loves Tom Cruise movies.
He added that industry executives are "absolutely playing it safe and also they, you know, they tend to whore after big producers and big stars."
"But mostly, nobody has any new ideas. They want to copy the old ideas, like 'Naked Gun 4' is really just a copy of an old idea. I mean, it's a 40-year-old idea to do an older actor as a police detective."
Although he didn't helm the latest version of "The Naked Gun," Zucker has been hard at work on multiple projects, including a totally new original spoof film, "Star of Malta."
The filmmaker described his upcoming film as "completely new." He said that it's "set in 1949. It's going to look like one of those film noir movies that were done from 1945 to 1955. And it's a really great story. And it is a believable story with a young actor cast. And you really believe that they're real people."
Providing a hint of what audiences could expect from the film's comedy, he added, "It's really what I would say – it's spoof 2.0. And it's really the next thing."
Zucker noted that it's going to be an indie release, because that's just how opposed big studios are to original projects these days.
"If you want to do something original, you have to go with the indie route. And 'Star of Malta' is only a $10 million budget. So, we'll be able to do that."
Zucker also mentioned his other new project, "Master Crash: A Crash Course In Spoof Comedy." The project is 15-episode instructional web series that teaches viewers the filmmaker's 15 rules of writing parody. The first episode of Master Crash debuted last month.
The filmmaker told Fox News Digital he wanted to make the course because he wants budding comedy filmmakers and writers to know the "discipline" that has to go into writing classic spoof or parody films for them to work.
"You know, it was all scenes, crazy and zany and weird, but there was a discipline to it," he explained. "And that discipline is – not only in the general story that we're telling – it has to be a believable story. And when I didn't tell a believable story with a believable character, with an arc, the movies weren't as successful."
"And then also you need the knowledge that we've gained about how to write the jokes and then how to direct the jokes," he said, adding, "There's a lot of method to it."
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
5 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Alien: Earth Boss Teases the Show's New Alien Species Designed to ‘Get Into Your Nightmares'
In space, you don't just have xenomorphs to worry about anymore. FX's new series Alien: Earth — premiering Tuesday, Aug. 12 — brings the Alien film franchise to the small screen with a fresh story about a research vessel full of alien specimens that crash-lands on Earth. Yes, the infamous xenomorph from the Alien movies is onboard… but so are a number of new alien species developed for the TV show, including a creepy-crawly centipede that crawls inside your body like the ear bugs from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and a jellyfish-like creature that sucks out your eyeball and takes over your body. Scared yet? More from TVLine Alien: Earth Boss Talks Bringing the Sci-Fi Franchise to TV - and Down to Earth for the First Time Casting News: Olivia Colman and Brie Larson's FX Drama, Jax Taylor Exits The Valley and More Casting News: Alison Brie's FX Pilot, One Tree Hill Vet Joins Emily in Paris and More 'One of the things that you can never reproduce in an audience that has seen an Alien movie is the feeling you had the first time you saw the life cycle of this creature in that first film,' showrunner Noah Hawley told a group of reporters at a recent press screening. 'It's just unreproducible. You know that it's an egg, and it's face huggers, it's chest bursters, all that. So that's where the idea for other creatures came from.' He wants Alien: Earth viewers to feel the same dread that moviegoers felt seeing the xenomorph for the first time: 'I want you to have that feeling, because that feeling is integral to the Alien experience. But I can't do it with these creatures. So let's introduce new creatures where you don't know how they reproduce or what they eat, so that you can have that 'I'm out' feeling multiple times a week.' When it came time to dream up the new creatures, Hawley says, 'some of it is just, 'What's the worst thing I could think of?' And the fun of it is not just: What's the design of the creature? And who do they kill? And what do they eat? But also, then you have the opportunity of, 'Well, how do they reproduce?' And that's going to be gross.' The new aliens are specimens in a space lab, Hawley explains: 'They're in a zoo, basically, but they don't stay in the zoo.' And every aspect of the creatures' design 'all goes to the 'get into your nightmares' part of it. Mostly, my hope is that people who watch the show will never do anything comfortably again. Like, 'Should I eat that? I should probably pick that piece of bread up. Look at what's under it.'' Best of TVLine Summer TV Calendar: Your Guide to 85+ Season and Series Premieres Classic Christmas Movies Guide: Where to Watch It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, Elf, Die Hard and Others What's New on Netflix in June
CNET
6 minutes ago
- CNET
I Played Battlefield 6: Hands-On With the Return To Big Battle Warfare
After a few hours playing the upcoming Battlefield 6, it's clear the game is designed to be a mea culpa to fans: Trust us, we're bringing back the Battlefield you remember. At a massive preview event in Los Angeles, I sat down to play a slice of the game's multiplayer mode -- and came off it suitably whelmed with a mix of raucous moments and tedious deaths. Ultimately, it feels like it will deliver the kind of big team battles players have been craving, with technical flourishes that amplify the gleeful chaos of a warzone. Developer DICE has a lot to prove with Battlefield 6. Its predecessors, 2018's World War II-themed Battlefield V and 2021's near-future Battlefield 2042, made unpopular changes to the game's formula, but subsequent updates salvaged some goodwill. So there's a reason the developers emphasized that DICE's newest game drew from the wells of Battlefield 3 and 4, returning to a successful era of big, destructive battles and retreating from some of the more drastic deviations. "We approached [this project] with this idea that not only do we want to draw inspiration from Battlefield 3 and 4, and sort of the best of the best in our series, we wanted to do it with our players," said Christian Grass, vice president and executive producer at DICE's Ripple Effect studios. "That was a big thing early on, get Battlefield Labs stood up, get [the game] out there, get players to play, and then start that conversation with them, listen to the feedback they're giving us and sort of build this game together." With the Battlefield Labs feedback program DICE set up, it's clear the studio wants to head off any potentially unpopular changes to the core gameplay people have come to expect from Battlefield. "With [Battlefield] Labs, everything that we're doing and communicating with our community early on, we want to make sure that we are landing it when [Battlefield 6] comes out," said Thomas "Tompen" Andersson, creative director at Ripple Effect. He noted that the team wants to "make sure that we don't have to counter some decisions that the community doesn't agree with." Labs has already provided Battlefield 6's developers with a wealth of data, from weapon pick rates to map movement patterns, that's led developers to tune the guns and different game modes. Their attention zooms down to the level of destructibility in objects, gathering feedback on whether walls are too sturdy or fragile and how that affects the player experience. "OK, maybe no one is using this lane, why aren't they using that? Oh, they feel like it's a kill zone, or there's not enough coverage," Andersson said. "We're taking that internally and testing and seeing if we can make that better." Read more: How to Join the Battlefield 6 Open Beta: Early Access Sign Up and Weekend Dates Balancing old and new Battlefield Battlefield 6 isn't a full rejection of modernity to embrace tradition. For instance, the game offers "closed weapon" modes that only let classes field select weapon categories to reinforce roles, while "open weapon" modes give everyone access to the game's full arsenal. But for the most part, it's a return to the arcade-y modern military shooter days that the community remembers more fondly than DICE's more recent experiments. The result, at least from the few hours of Battlefield 6 multiplayer I played, is a polished shooter with a lot of focus on making skirmishes exciting at any scale. Long-range sniper duels and tank battles felt as intense as close-quarters gunfights, all of which could be happening mere feet from each other on the same map. There are enough modes, guns, tools and play styles to give players whatever experience they crave in a military shooter. Whether that's tight-knit squad fights in alleyways or large-scale clashes between platoons of dozens of players each, you can pick weapons and a kit to customize to your liking -- running and gunning, fixing up armored vehicles, sniping from afar or reviving teammates -- all strategies felt viable. I felt that I contributed to the victory even if I wasn't leading my team in kills, and had the freedom to play out my little medic or tank commander fantasies. The preview didn't include any single-player content, leaving us in the dark about what's in store for the game's globe-trotting story campaign, which pitches a beleaguered NATO against the mysterious private military corporation, Pax Armata. But to be frank, single-player content is a nice extra -- it's far more important to evaluate the game's bones, which feel solid, if teetering on the edge of flooding players with complexity. Maps, classes, kits and guns: Grappling with too many options My Battlefield 6 preview rotated me between four modes, showing off different battle scales, goals and objectives. Conquest is the classic Battlefield experience, big maps split into multiple objective zones to capture, which fragments the fight into small areas with their own quirks and features. Breakthrough is still a big map, but you only play in thin sections of it at a time -- if the attacking team wins control of objective zones, the defenders retreat to the next slice of the map. Domination ditches vehicles for small-scale squad battles that rack up points with captured zones, king-of-the-hill style. Squad Deathmatch is a simple four-squad competition for who reaches the kill limit first. Unsurprisingly, the maps are split according to size. The larger maps in the preview included Liberation Peak, which felt like the platonic ideal of a Battlefield map -- a mountainous desert with small bases to hold, rocky outcrops to perch behind while sniping, buildings to swarm and wide roads to race down with tanks and light armored vehicles, all while helicopters and jets race overhead. The other big map, Siege of Cairo, is an urban battlefield with plenty of wide shooting lanes for vehicles and tight buildings for alleyway combat. The big maps captured my attention, but the smaller ones still held a lot of charm, particularly Iberian Offensive, where I held strong on several rounds of Domination, leaping between and on top of buildings to hold zones. Empire State was also in our rotation, a close-quarters slugfest with too many corners, I found myself getting smoked from behind frequently. While we didn't play them, our guide noted five other maps coming to the game at launch, including Operation Firestorm which is returning from Battlefield 3. Through all this, players deploy with one of four classes: Assault, Engineer, Support and Recon. Each has its unique perks: Assault heals faster and has explosive gadgets like grenade launchers, Engineer has a vehicle-fixing blowtorch and auto-repairs vehicles they ride in, Support has a healing resupply pack they can throw to the ground and uses defibrillators to quickly revive teammates and Recon can call UAVs and use motion sensor gadgets. Each class has an active skill that I honestly forgot about in the heat of battle -- including Assault's ability to see outlines of enemies through walls if they're making enough noise. EA DICE You can sit with the pre-made weapon-and-gear loadouts and dive into the game or customize them. I found it satisfying to get just the right attachments on my guns, but that's as far as I took it. Gadgets, explosives, grenades and sidearms stack up so many options that I didn't bother with much beyond my main weapon. Perhaps I could've gotten a better edge with all those extras, and Andersson described some truly novel gadgets coming in the main game like a sniper decoy that distracts enemies from far away and up close and personal laser devices that act as sniping rangefinders. But the quick time-to-kill made it feel like any moment I wasn't ready to snap my assault rifle to someone popping out of a corner would be a duel I'd lose. I did okay -- heck, in a couple matches I was even near the top of the scoreboards -- but I never dominated. At the best moments, I was in tune with my squad, often using the new anyone-can-revive feature to put my teammates back on their feet (Support class does this faster). In the worst moments, I got shot in the back over and over as enemies seemingly came out of nowhere, with no time to shoot back. High highs and low lows abound. It wasn't that the game felt unfair or that there was a skill cap I wasn't close to reaching (though obviously there were plenty of players even in my preview who had no trouble taking me down). It felt like it walked a tightrope balancing lethality, movement and slight tactical choices. That refinement feels like the result of all the aforementioned player feedback DICE is getting with Battlefield Labs -- including how to blow buildings up just right. EA DICE Nailing the right flavor of Battlefield-style map destruction A staple of Battlefield games is environmental destruction -- how much of the map crumbles and explodes as it's peppered with tank shells and grenades over the course of a match. As I played these maps over and over again, I saw how certain high-traffic zones would get obliterated by the time the match ended, with buildings reduced to rubble and areas around objectives flattened. It's technically impressive, and if I believe what the developers say, potentially useful. This is Battlefield's so-called Tactical Destruction, it's the idea that you can blow holes in walls or take out sniper nests to change the terrain. Through testing, the game's developers honed the destruction to reliably operate the same way every time -- something players can depend on to give them options in firefights. "We know that people love when things blow up, but there needs to be substance to all of these things that you're doing, right? So that's why it's so central to me that it's deterministic -- that you can rely on 'if I nail this rocket right here in this house, then exactly this is going to happen'," Andersson said. While DICE included visual language to communicate conditions to the players -- like cracks in the walls that are ready to shatter on the next explosion -- they don't expect folks to take advantage of Tactical Destruction at first. That comes from map knowledge gained over time, and players could eventually start seeing the logic in paving the way toward objectives with explosives. Then they can combine this with other items like the assault ladder gadget, which Andersson notes could give squads second-floor access to surprise enemies. In my preview, I didn't even get close to destroying the environment to my advantage. But the explosions were impressively immersive. While hunkered down in a building in the Siege of Cairo map, tank shells and rockets turned our shelter into rubble as the roof caved in around us, flooding the room in dust and blinding us as we rushed out. Occasionally overwhelming and often distracting me from firefights, the game's destruction tech put me more firmly in my soldier's boots, escalating the chaos and locking me into skirmishes that ratcheted up in tension, with each boom echoing in my headphones. In this, I felt DICE looking to recapture the controlled chaos that makes Battlefield games unique among the military shooters of today -- namely Call of Duty. But returning to the successful Battlefield titles from a decade ago means, hopefully, giving players a chance to recreate moments they loved. In that, it's looking like Battlefield 6 could be what those nostalgic gamers are waiting for. "If you start with Battlefield 3 and 4 that we know is loved and [say] let's execute on those staples and pillars, I feel like this is almost like a cheat code -- this is what Battlefield should be," Andersson said. Battlefield 6 launches on Oct. 10 for PC, PS5 and Xbox Series X/S. Free open beta weekends will run on Aug. 9-10 and Aug. 14-16.
Fox News
7 minutes ago
- Fox News
Martial arts expert teaches top self-defense moves you need to know
Empower Martial Arts & Self-Defense's Jennifer Burke shows off her top self-defense moves on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'
