Did Hollywood Do Anna Faris Dirty? A 25-Year Reckoning
She made Scary Movie a blockbuster, got cut from the franchise, and somehow stayed gracious about it.
Anna Faris didn’t audition for Scary Movie expecting to become a star. She didn’t expect to become anything, really. In the summer of 1999, she was a fresh college graduate from Seattle who had moved to Los Angeles to follow a guy. She’d never done comedy in her life. She waited tables, then recorded an audition tape from her childhood home and sent it in just to see what would happen.
That tape changed everything.
Scary Movie became a blockbuster. It made $278 million on a $19 million budget. And it launched Anna Faris onto the A-list, or at least close enough that Hollywood noticed her. But as she looks back now, 26 years later, returning to that franchise for Scary Movie 6, Faris has had to confront something she’s been too polite to say out loud for a very long time: Hollywood systematically undervalued her when she was the one making them money.
Anna Faris Was Number One on the Call Sheet. Yet, She Wasn’t on the Poster
In 2011, Vulture ran a profile asking whether Anna Faris would finally make the leap to genuine A-list status. She was on the verge, they said. She’d had The House Bunny, a lead role she produced herself. She was in talks for major films. But even then, the reporting made clear what Hollywood’s gatekeepers really thought: Faris straddled two worlds and properly occupied neither. She was almost, but not quite, in the same tier as Drew Barrymore, Cameron Diaz, and Katherine Heigl.
What the 2011 analysis didn’t address was something Faris herself didn’t say publicly. She had already been systematically underpaid and undervalued in the very franchise that made her famous. She was the star of Scary Movie, number one on the call sheet, and the character everyone remembered. But she wasn’t in the first poster. And while the films were making massive money, she wasn’t being paid like a star.
“I was number one on the call sheet but wasn’t in the first poster and wasn’t paid anywhere near the most,” she revealed in an interview on Josh Horowitz’s podcast this year. “It was a humbling start.”
That word—humbling—encapsulates everything she didn’t say for 25 years. Yes, she was grateful. She knew she’d gotten lucky. She was a long shot. But she was also being exploited à la Hollywood, meaning, when the person being exploited starts to believe they deserve it.
Then They Cut Her Out Entirely
For Scary Movie 3 and 4, Faris stayed on. The Wayans brothers, who created and starred in the franchise, weren’t asked back after the second film. But Faris was contractually obligated. As the professional she is, she showed up. She did the work. And then, in 2013, when Scary Movie 5 came around, she wasn’t invited. Nobody called. The franchise that had defined her career simply moved forward without her.
For 20 years, she didn’t speak to Marlon Wayans. When her agent called every few years to suggest maybe new executives would bring the series back, maybe there’d be another opportunity, she’d say no. She felt undervalued financially. After all, she had other work. She had moved on, or at least she pretended to.
But here’s the thing: the Wayans brothers fought to get their franchise back. They went to war with the studios. Marlon Wayans has repeatedly said they had the franchise “taken from them,” and he directly named Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob as instrumental in losing those rights. There was a contractual dispute and a negotiation. A pissing contest, if you will.
For her part, Anna Faris was just replaced. She wasn’t fighting because she felt she wasn’t in a position to fight. She was one woman who had been underpaid from the jump. And when Hollywood decided to move on, she stayed quiet and gracious.
The Pratt Years: Visibility Doesn’t Mean Agency
In 2009, Anna Faris married Chris Pratt. From the outside, this looked like a power move. Pratt was rising, and she was established. Together, they were a Hollywood couple. But, as it’s often the case, over the next nine years, Faris’s individual identity merged into “Chris Pratt’s wife.”
She had a successful career in the industry. She appeared in Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. These were roles that should have confirmed her as a serious actress, not just a comedienne. But the industry had already decided what she was. A 2011 agent quoted in Vulture said, “There’s not a lot of girls like her who do ‘hot’ and ‘funny.’” The implicit perception was that she couldn’t do anything else.
When Lost in Translation came out, people assumed her role was a dig at Cameron Diaz. That assumption followed her for years. In 2026, she finally addressed it on a podcast: “It felt like it took a little something away from my flavor, and because I had auditioned for it and earned it as that performance. I always felt, like, ‘No, I’m not part of some grand, weird sabotage.’” She had, once again, to defend the legitimacy of her own work.
During those Pratt years, Faris had visibility, though not agency. She was visible because of her marriage, yet she wasn’t being courted for roles; casting directors saw her as “Chris Pratt’s wife.” And when the marriage ended in 2018, she was left with something worse than being underpaid in a blockbuster franchise. She was left with the wreckage of being publicly associated with a man whose career only went up, and the subliminal accusation of “maybe you did something wrong.”
The Gendered Math That Hollywood Won’t Admit
Let’s break it down: Two groups of people built Scary Movie’s massive success. The Wayans brothers and Anna Faris with Regina Hall. The Wayans negotiated power, got cut out, fought back, and won their franchise back. Faris and Hall got cut out and stayed cut out. One way or another, they became background elements in a story about the Wayans taking back their creation.
This is the same old Hollywood story where men have leverage and agents who fight for them, and women must be grateful, pleasant, and available if the industry decides to use them again.
That’s why, when Faris was asked to return for Scary Movie 6, she had “complicated feelings,” as she’s described them. She said she always imagined that if she came back, “it would be a concession of my soul. Because I imagined I would be a cameo and get paid a lot of money, but not enough. Not enough for my pride.” Talk about systemic undervaluation.
Anna Faris’s Return Is Not Going Unnoticed
When Marlon Wayans called in February 2025 to tell her they got the franchise back, something changed. Faris came back for Scary Movie 6. And for the first time in 25 years, she felt what she described as genuine valuation.
“I felt valued in a way that I never thought the franchise would give me,” she told Entertainment Weekly. “It felt very, very, very meaningful and powerful to me to be able to look at Marlon in particular and be like, ‘Dude, I love you. Your family gave me something huge. And I’m beloved by association.’”
While Faris was genuinely thanking him for valuing her, we cannot help but notice that she’s still performing gratitude for being treated fairly.
In The End, The Question Isn’t Whether Hollywood Did Her Dirty. It’s Why She Had to Be So Nice About It.
Anna Faris is an adored comedienne and part of the life of an entire generation. She’s had a long career, working with major directors. By any measure, she’s had success.
But the question isn’t whether she made it. It’s what she lost along the way by being too polite to fight back. It’s what her career would have looked like if she’d had the same leverage, the same institutional support, the same assumption of power that the men around her had. It’s what happens when a woman is told she’s lucky to be there, so many times, that she starts to believe it’s true.
Today, when Faris talks about her role in Primetime, a small dramatic part opposite Robert Pattinson, she describes it as “incredible.” Yeah, the movie might be great, but she’s still conditioned to be gracious. That’s what happens when you spend 25 years in an industry that’s convinced you that being paid less than you’re worth is actually a gift.