Anna Faris says Scary Movie 6 cut Melania Trump joke

Anna Faris says Scary Movie 6 lost one of its sharpest political jokes in the edit, a small cut that says a lot about how mainstream comedy now measures risk. The deleted bit was aimed at Melania Trump’s Be Best campaign and would have shown Cindy Campbell, blackout drunk in her truck, looking in the rearview mirror and delivering a line that riffed on the slogan.

The joke mattered because Be Best was never just a celebrity branding exercise. Melania Trump launched the initiative at the White House on May 7, 2018, and the effort was framed by the White House as a push on children’s well-being, including social, emotional and physical health, with cyberbullying as a central emphasis. A broadside at that message lands squarely in the territory Scary Movie has always occupied, where pop culture, politics and bad taste are treated as fair game.

Faris’s return as Cindy Campbell also restores a key piece of the franchise’s original appeal. She first played the character in Scary Movie in 2000, then returned for Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4 before sitting out Scary Movie 5 in 2013. The new film, widely referred to as Scary Movie 6, opened in U.S. theaters on June 5, 2026, directed by Michael Tiddes and written by Marlon Wayans, Shawn Wayans, Keenen Ivory Wayans, Craig Wayans and Rick Alvarez. Regina Hall joins the reunion, giving the reboot its most familiar core in years.

The commercial context helps explain why even a franchise built on provocation can still self-censor. Scary Movie had been dormant for roughly 13 years after Scary Movie 5, and the box-office history shows why the studio would want the comeback to land cleanly. The original Scary Movie grossed about $157 million worldwide, Scary Movie 3 about $110 million worldwide and Scary Movie 4 about $178.7 million worldwide. Scary Movie 5 fell back to about $32 million domestically and about $78.6 million worldwide, a reminder that the brand still carries value, but not immunity.

The result is a familiar tension in today’s entertainment economy: satire still sells the promise of transgression, yet the most combustible jokes are often the first to disappear. Faris seemed comfortable with that tradeoff, but the cut Melania Trump gag shows how political comedy is being calibrated not only by taste, but by the business judgment of what a mass audience, and the studio backing it, will tolerate.