How The Naked Gun Took On Studio Notes, OJ Simpson & John Wick’s “Truly Psychotic” Physics

The Naked Gun is relentlessly dumb, unapologetically chaotic, and arguably one of the most impressive movies of the year. The movie soft reboots a franchise entire generations have never heard of while still offering plenty of ties to the Leslie Nielsen classics, lets Pamela Anderson flex her comedic chops, and puts Taken star Liam Neeson in a schoolgirl uniform.

And, somehow, it all works, at least if you trust The Naked Gun’s Rotten Tomatoes score. The movie’s frenetic energy wheels audiences through gag after gag, light-footedly leaping into and out of the realm of commentary with jokes about bodycams and racial profiling while still managing not to take itself seriously.

ScreenRant’s The Naked Gun review states that the movie “revels” in the “old-school style of comedy filmmaking” exemplified by spoof films like Austin Powers and Airplane! This is thanks to the work of co-writers Doug Mand, Dan Gregor, and Akiva Schaffer, the latter of whom also directed the movie. The three also collaborated on 2022’s Chip ‘n Dale: Rescue Rangers.

ScreenRant interviewed The Naked Gun writers Doug Mand and Dan Gregor about bringing the spoof movie back in 2025. The pair explained how Liam Neeson’s best box office film in years was made to captivate audiences right off the bat, and the unique ways in which it honored–and addressed–aspects of the original trilogy’s legacy.

How Dan Gregor & Doug Mand Welcome You Into The World Of The Naked Gun

From The Dark Knight To “Looney Tunes Rules” In One Sequence

The Naked Gun opens with a heist that, in Dan Gregor’s words, “should feel like The Dark Knight. It’s very much inspired by that opening Dark Knight bank heist.” The seriousness of the movie’s opening–which ends in the trailer moment that features Liam Neeson in a schoolgirl uniform–was very much by design.

“For us,” Gregor said, “one of the really fun things was thinking about Airplane!, about how long it takes Airplane! to reveal itself as a completely ridiculous movie.” In the world of spoof, Gregor said, “the jokes are all takes on pre-existing genres, so we need to really feel the genre first.”

The question the writers asked themselves, then, was “how long can we hold onto this before we do our really, really dumb, silly, completely illogical reveal that [Frank Drebin] is hiding inside the body of a tiny, tiny, little girl,” Gregor said.

“Hopefully, that being the first real joke of the movie,” the writer continued, “where you’re like, ‘that makes literally zero sense,’ is a very clear intro for anyone who doesn’t understand what they’re about to watch, like, ‘Oh, this movie is more Looney Tunes rules than it is any reality.’”

Part of the job of that sequence is to make those rules clear for anyone who didn’t grow up watching Scary Movie, Austin Powers, or even the many Mel Brooks classics like Spaceballs. “It’s just a big ridiculous thing,” co-writer Doug Mand added, “and you’re like, ‘This is it.’ You either are into this kind of movie or not.”

“We’re never going to explain, after the fact, how he has the technology to fit inside of a little girl,” Dan Gregor said. “It’s deeply not meant to ever have to answer those questions.”

The Naked Gun Writers Reflect On Making A Police Spoof In 2025

It’s “A Hard Time To Be Like, ‘Let’s All Laugh Along With The Cop’”

Early in The Naked Gun, there is a joke in which Frank Drebin Jr. winks at a suggestion by his commanding officer to make sure his bodycam is turned on–a joke that is easy to imagine landing the wrong way in the current political climate.

“It’s interesting,” Doug Mand said on the subject, “Obviously, it is a very strange, hard time to be like, ‘Let’s all laugh along with the cop.’” But that sort of commentary didn’t begin with the Liam Neeson reboot, Mand said: “If you go back to the original Naked Gun, it’s very much built into the DNA.”

“Frank Drebin says he’s been fired from Police Squad, he’s packing up his files, and he’s like, ‘Just to think: next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested for it.’” Mand says, adding, “which could easily be in our movie.”

“It is about police violence and it’s about overaggressive cops, and they were poking fun of that then,” Gregor added.

Gregor shared an apt comparison, saying “There’s hopefully a Talladega Nights to this, [where] you either think that culture is silly and you’re laughing a little at it, or you think it’s great and you’re laughing with it. And both those things can be true.”

“The point … was never to be like, ‘We’re making a statement,’” Mand finished, saying, “This is not the movie to do that. We’re making observations over the last 30 years of movies that have not been spoofed, and that’s where we’re coming from.”

Dealing With OJ Simpson’s The Naked Gun Character Was A Top Priority

“This Was One Of [Everyone’s] First Questions”

The Naked Gun’s most obvious tie-in with the original films is a visual gag in which Frank Drebin Jr. visits his deceased father’s portrait on the wall. He’s one of many cops crying in front of pictures of their fathers–except when the camera shows the son of OJ Simpson’s Officer Nordberg, the character simply shakes his head to the audience.

“This was one of the first questions,” Mand said. “When [we’d] tell people ‘We’re doing a Naked Gun,’ one of the top three questions was, ‘How are you dealing with OJ? How are you dealing with Nordberg?’ [So,] we knew it was something we had to deal with.”

But finding the right tone for the moment took work, the writer revealed. “We quickly learned, while we were writing it with Akiva, that we didn’t want to live in it too long. Obviously, we’re laughing, [but] there’s a significant tragedy behind this man and his legacy.”

“But if Ryan Murphy can win an Emmy for it, we can make [a joke],” Gregor chimed in.

Mand agreed: “We feel like we succeeded where maybe Ryan Murphy could have been a little funnier.”

Note: SPOILERS from here on out.

How The Naked Gun’s Brilliant Gunfight Came To Be

Writers Break Down A Standout Third-Act Decision

The action climax of The Naked Gun involves consumer tech gone awry in such a way that innocent people are essentially turned into mindless zombies with one directive: take down Frank Drebin Jr. His life on the line, Liam Neeson’s Drebin whips out two pistols, aims them at the crowd–and doesn’t fire a single bullet.

What happens next is an inspired bit of spoofery from Mand, Gregor, and Akiva Schaffer, as Drebin–in The Matrix-esque slow motion–instead ejects the clips from his pistols toward his attackers, taking them out non-lethally. The only time Drebin does pull the trigger, it’s to literally shoot someone’s knocked-out tooth back into his mouth.

When asked about how that scene came together, Gregor shared that “We were very aware that there’s all this stuff they just didn’t have access to in the original Naked Guns, and this type of bullet time action sequence is such a trope of the genre now.”

“I love these movies,” Gregor added, “but John Wick is near parody in the way that they’re fighting off bullets with swords. It is truly psychotic to think [about the physics of] what is in these movies, so we really wanted to play with the dumbest physics. I think that was sort of the assignment on that.”

“The assignment, also,” Mand shared, “is the trope of, ‘This is our protagonist. He’s not going to shoot innocent people,’ which is also something we’ve seen before: ‘How do we get around him kicking ass but not killing anyone?’ So, taking this one trope and blowing it out into a ridiculous place–that was part of the assignment as well.

The Naked Gun’s Frank Drebin Sr. Cameo, Explained

How A Studio Note Led To One Of The Movie’s Wildest Moments

Comedy legend and original The Naked Gun star Leslie Nielsen passed away in 2010, but his Frank Drebin made a surprising appearance in the reboot anyway in a third-act surprise that was undeniably a hoot. The best part may be that, according to the writers, this version of Drebin was written with a touch of rebellion.

“The studio kept giving us this note where it’s like, ‘We want a deeper relationship with Frank Drebin Senior.’” Gregor shared, adding, “That, for us, [is] in some ways a death knell–to be too up the ass of the old movies. You don’t want the audience to … be constantly thinking about, ‘Do I know those old movies well enough?’”

“We were like, ‘We don’t want to do that,’” Gregor said, “so we’re like, ‘How do we do that in a way that is really stupid?’”

There was more to it too, though, said Mand. “We all know that we’re all [endlessly] trying to please our fathers and make them proud of us. [So, the questions were,] ‘How do we blow that idea out,’ and ‘Where does toxic masculinity come from?’”

“[It’s] this idea that this macho man could be like, ‘I just want to see you again. I just want you to love me,’” Mand stated. He continued: “Liam Neeson saying ‘daddy’ in such a genuine way is one of my favorite things because it is so innocent.”

Interestingly, audiences nearly got a different version of that scene. “There’s another [version],” Gregor revealed, “where, after he rode the owl … he’s like, ‘Thank you, daddy. Thank you,’ and then we cut to the owl and he’s just eating a rat on the ground. You realize, ‘Oh, it was just an owl. There was no metaphor there.’”

Mand jumped in too: “I think the other joke was that Paul Walter Hauser would be like, ‘This is my dad,’ and he’s playing with a lion that escaped a zoo, and then that lion attacks him and he’s like, ‘It’s not my dad!’”

“They didn’t want to pay for a lion,” Gregor shared, “much to our sadness.”

The Naked Gun

8/10

Release Date

August 1, 2025

Director

Akiva Schaffer

Writers

Akiva Schaffer, Doug Mand, Dan Gregor

Producers

Erica Huggins

Franchise(s)

The Naked Gun