Greta Gerwig’s Barbie might be winning the box office battle with an opening projected to be at least twice as high, if not more, but Oppenheimer has emerged in front in the critical war. However, the best-reviewed movie releasing today is neither of them, with that accolade going to Netflix’s They Cloned Tyrone.
On any other day, a blockbuster sci-fi hailing from the market-leading streaming service that boasts Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, Golden Globe winner John Boyega, and Marvel Cinematic Universe favorite Teyonah Parris in the lead roles would be generating a lot more buzz, but the Barbenheimer freight train has left it feeling like something of an afterthought.
However, a Certified Fresh Rotten Tomatoes approval rating of 98 percent is evidence enough you shouldn’t be sleeping on They Cloned Tyrone, a unique genre-bender that incorporates elements of science fiction, mystery, thriller, social satire, classism, and Blaxploitation all at once.
As if those weren’t enough influences, co-writer and director Juel Taylor even name-dropped Scooby-Doo as an inspiration to Inverse, which sounds strange until you see the film and discover it makes total sense.
“Just from a meat-and-potatoes standpoint, it was just wanting to make a bootleg Scooby-Doo movie: a mystery movie where these detectives are the most ill-equipped detectives to solve a mystery, but somehow strangely equipped at the same time due to a very unique set of skills that your average detectives may not possess. I think those two things came together to create the plot in the story, so to speak. And from there, the conspiracies kind of organically grew out of that.”
Now that you’ve heard the Scooby-Doo comparison, it’ll be impossible to forget once you catch They Cloned Tyrone and realize it’s entirely accurate, whether that’s before, after, or in between a Barbie/Oppenheimer double-bill.
