NO- LAUGHING MATTER
Hollywood has serious disinterest in comedies after a string of flops
Days before the opening of the Will Ferrell- Amy Poehler comedy “The House,” producer Adam McKay could see the writing on the wall. The box- office forecast for the film wasn’t looking good.
In the end, “The House” opened with just $ 8.7 million, the latest in an increasingly long line of comedy flops. “The House” may have had its problems ( Warner Bros. opted to not even screen it for critics), but what stood out about the result was how dispiritingly typical it was.
“This has just been happening a lot. If it’s not our comedies, it’s other comedies from friends of ours that just are underperforming very consistently,” said McKay, whose production company with Ferrell makes a handful of comedies a year.
Unless this weekend’s “Girls Trip” — promoted as the black, female version of “The Hangover” — breaks out, this summer will likely pass without a big comedy hit. “Rough Night,” “Baywatch” and “Snatched” have all disappointed despite the star power of Scarlett Johansson, Dwayne Johnson and Amy Schumer, respectively. The lone sensation, breaking out from a specialty release to mainstream success, has been the Kumail Nanjiani- led, Judd Apatow- produced “The Big Sick.”
Laughs are drying up at the multiplex, and it’s a trend that goes beyond this summer. Last year, the shockingly poor performance of Andy Samberg’s “Popstar” ($ 9.6 million in its entire run) foreshadowed the trouble to come. There have been some successes (“Bad Moms,” “Sausage Party,” “Trainwreck,” “Central Intelligence,” “Spy”), but it’s been a long while since a cultural sensation like “The 40 Year- Old Virgin,” “The Hangover” or “Bridesmaids.”
The downturn begs the question: Can the big- screen comedy survive the superhero era? As stu- dios have increasingly focused on intellectual property- backed franchises that play around the globe, comedies are getting squeezed. Though usually relatively inexpensive propositions, comedies often don’t fit the blockbuster agenda of risk- averse Hollywood.
“They really want these movies to work in China and Russia, and comedies don’t always work like that,” says Apatow.
In interviews with many top names in comedy, as well as numerous studio executives, many expressed optimism that a turnaround could and will be sparked by something fresh and exciting — a “Get Out” for comedy. But they also described an unmistakable sense that the era of “Superbad,” “Pineapple Express” and “Step Brothers” may be closing, and that an increasingly restrictive Hollywood landscape is partly to blame.
“It does worry me because it feels like the studios aren’t developing as many comedy scripts,” adds Apatow. “In the old days, they used to buy a lot of scripts and develop them. And now it feels like times have changed. Unless you bring them a script with an actor or actress and a director and it’s all packaged, there’s not a lot of chances to get comedies made.”
The comedies that have managed to get made have often recycled many of the familiar, previously profitable formulas. McKay has watched marketing departments increasingly dictate which comedies get greenlit.
“That’s their whole thing: ‘ What’s the formula so we can go to the boardroom?’ ” says McKay. “All of a sudden, I start noticing that people keep asking for comedies to look like other comedies. And we keep saying, ‘ Yeah, but comedies have to be original.’ ”
But “original” can be a scary word in today’s Hollywood. Thus the “Ghostbusters” reboot, thus “Baywatch.” At the same time, other formats — “Old School”- like party movies, for example — have grown a little stale from overuse.
“What I think you’re seeing in the last three years is just fatigue with those structures,” McKay says. “They did the worst thing that a comedy can ever do, which is start to feel familiar. I really think this isn’t permanent. It’s going to break out, but what it’s going to require is three or four accidents to happen again, like ‘ Austin Powers’ and ‘ Anchorman.’ ”
Producer Michael De Luca, who championed “Austin Powers” at New Line and produced comedies like “Rush Hour” and “The Love Guru,” recalled the thunderbolt experience of reading the spec script for “American Pie,” which heralded the explosion of R- rated comedy.
“I do feel like these things are cyclical,” says De Luca. “Each generation discovers their punk- rock comedy. It may not have happened yet for the generation that’s coming up behind Seth Rogen, who was behind Judd Apatow.”
But the next generation might gravitate to HBO or FX or Netflix instead. That’s where you’ll find many of today’s most exciting comic voices, like Donald Glover (“Atlanta”), Lena Dunham (“Girls”) and Issa Rae (“Insecure”).
The path to a nationwide movie release is more difficult. A large percentage of recent comedies have starred either Kevin Hart, Seth Rogen, Melissa McCarthy or Ferrell — who are, granted, some of the funniest people alive.
“You see a lot of the big Hollywood comedies have the same people playing the same type of people in the same sort of highstakes but not too high- stakes situations,” says Nanjiani, who also stars on HBO’s “Silicon Valley.” “The fact that there’s only a handful of people that are deemed worthy of being big comedy leads, it means that you can’t really have that much variance in the types of movies that get made.”