Naked Gun director David Zucker was quite unimpressed with the franchise legacy carried forward by Akiva Schaffer’s new sequel starring Liam Neeson.
Zucker believes that the new installment had a lot of copied elements from the original film and it also lacked from providing the true plot.
The director opened that him and his brother Jerry started making comedy movie 50 years ago with their organic ideas and own style. Later, everybody stated copying it.
“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.”
“People started copying it, like Seth MacFarlane for the new ‘Naked Gun.’ He totally missed it”, David explained in an interview with Woman’s World.
He further compared how both the films were made on a different budget. The original Naked Gun cost them around $14.5 million. Whereas the new sequel was made on a budget of $42 million.
Zucker emphasized, “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”, he continued.
The 2025 Naked Gun featured Neeson along with Pamela Anderson, Cody Rhodes and Liza Koshy.