I'll never forget the first time I watched the original Airplane!—a gut-busting spoof that turned disaster movies into comedy gold. So when The Asylum dropped the trailer for Airplane 2025, I was ready for a nostalgic hit. Spoiler: it's more of a turbulent nosedive than a smooth landing.
The trailer for Airplane 2025—a 2025 riff on the 1980 classic—leans hard into its B-movie roots. Directed by indie filmmaker Adrian Avila, this spoof-of-a-spoof trades the original's sharp wit for something… stickier. Think less “Don't call me Shirley” and more “Join the Mile High Club!”—complete with a cannabis-branded plane (Flight 420, naturally) and Tom Arnold's name plastered across the sky. The poster screams it all: a pair of bare legs stretched across airplane seats, a cheeky nod to the sexual revolution plot where repressed college co-eds let loose at 30,000 feet. Subtle? Not even close. It's like The Hangover decided to take a redeye flight—with a pit stop at a dispensary.
Let's talk historical context. The Asylum has been churning out low-budget mockbusters for years—think Sharknado or Transmorphers. Their formula? Take a popular concept, add a twist, and crank the camp to eleven. Airplane 2025 fits the mold, but it's a far cry from the original Airplane!'s brilliance. Back in 1980, directors Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers roasted the disaster genre with surgical precision—think Airport or The Poseidon Adventure—delivering a comedy that still holds up 45 years later. Fast forward to 2010s mockbusters like The Starving Games (a Hunger Games spoof), and the pattern is clear: modern spoofs often swap cleverness for shock. Airplane 2025 doubles down on that trend, prioritizing sex and stoner gags over the tight writing that made its predecessor a classic. What's different this time? The cannabis angle—timely, sure, but it feels more like a marketing gimmick than a comedic goldmine.
The trailer itself is a mixed bag. On one hand, it's got that unapologetic Asylum energy—big, loud, and a little messy. The “Flight 420” branding and the poster's weed leaf emblem are bold choices, tapping into the cultural zeitgeist of legalization (a 2023 Pew Research study noted 88% of Americans support some form of cannabis legalization—timely, Asylum!). On the other hand, the humor feels forced. A line like “Whatever it is you girls do, I'm sure it's nice and innocent” lands with all the grace of a paper airplane in a hurricane. And while the original Airplane! balanced absurdity with heart, this trailer leans too hard into raunch, leaving me wondering if there's even one laugh worth the ticket price.
Here's teh uncomfortable truth: Airplane 2025 might be more fun to laugh at than with. The poster's red-hot title and cheeky tagline—“Join the Mile High Club!”—promise a wild ride, but the trailer's reliance on dated sex jokes feels like a relic of early 2000s comedies. Still—I can't lie—there's a part of me that's curious. Maybe it's the nostalgia talking, or maybe I just want to see if Tom Arnold can pull off a Leslie Nielsen-level deadpan. If anything, this movie might just send you running back to the 1980 classic, which, according to a 2022 Variety retrospective, still ranks among the top 10 comedy films of all time.
So, would you risk watching Airplane 2025? It's out now in select theaters (one each in NY, CA, GA, OH, MN) and on VOD as of April 20, 2025. Drop your thoughts below—I'm dying to know if this flight's worth boarding!
