Women-led comedies seek respect
Despite millions at box office, Hollywood remains skeptical
IN LIFE
Girls just wanna booze, let loose and avoid jail for accidentally killing a stripper, too.
Rough Night, the raunchy female ensemble comedy arriving Friday, offers exactly that. As the straight (wo)man, Scarlett Johansson plays a bride-tobe who heads to Miami for a weekend of penis-straw-fueled debauchery with four girlfriends (Kate McKinnon, Jillian Bell, Ilana Glazer and Zoë Kravitz) — until things take a deadly turn.
Directed and co-written by Lucia Aniello ( Broad City), Rough Night’s trailers promise Hangover- style antics from a female perspective. (The poster goes so far as to note “the hangover will be the least of their problems.”) But despite its star power, the R-rated comedy is ar- riving in theaters like day-old confetti, with analysts anticipating the film will finish fourth at the box office, behind Wonder Woman, Cars 3 and Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez on Me.
At a recent screening in Los Angeles, the comedy played exceedingly well, with rolling laughter and gasps filling the theater as the Miami mayhem played out. What gives?
“People are quick to judge comedies led by women,” Aniello says. “I know for ours, based on just trailers or posters, (it’s) like, ‘Oh, this is just a remake of this’ or ‘a female version of that.’ (People assume they know) what it is just because women are in it, which is really unfortunate and a sign of a bigger problem with society, more than just how we market movies.”
The same out-of-the-gate dismissal was memorably dealt to last summer’s hit Bad Moms, the Mila Kunis-led rejection of white-glove parenting that scored $113 million (and has spawned a sequel, A Bad Moms Christmas, expected for the holidays).
With fellow hits like Kristen
Wiig and Maya Rudolph’s Bridesmaids ($169 million) and Amy Schumer’s semi-autobiographical
Trainwreck ($110 million) in Hollywood’s rear-view mirror, why must female-led comedies continually be forced to rise above sleeper status?
The disparity often starts with production budgets. Rough Night was green-lit at a bargain price of $20 million. “In general, movies by and about women, whatever they’re rated, don’t have as big of an investment as movies by and about men,” says Melissa Silverstein, founder of the Women and Hollywood website, which advocates for gender diversity in the film industry. She predicts Rough Night “will probably do way better than they expect, because there is still a thirst for these kinds of movies.”
But even as they hit theaters, female-led R-rated comedies are still received as something as a curiosity, says Kate Erbland, film editor at IndieWire.com.
“Those sorts of films fall under a boys-will-be-boys spirit that simply isn’t applied to femaledriven comedies, no matter how wrong that might be,” she says. “When women act in a raunchy manner, most audiences still think it’s somehow shocking, and that seems to be what inevitably becomes the focus, not the actual humor of the films.”
So there’s money, and then there’s perception.
The genre is haunted by “these outmoded ideas that raunchiness belongs to the guys,” says Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst for comScore. “There’s always been this line that filmmakers or society didn’t want to cross that women can be just as funny, raunchy, crude and crass as the guys, to great comedic effect. We’re just seeing the evolution of that. But for every movie that’s good, there’s proba- bly one or two that are bad, and that sets it back.”
It’s true that there lies a graveyard of comedies headlined by women that choked ( Hot Pursuit,
How to Be Single and the ill-fated Ghostbusters reboot come to mind). But let’s be fair: The guys have their flops, too (looking at you, CHIPS and Baywatch).
The key to success is often authenticity. Bridesmaids “told a lot of truth about female friendships and female relationships,” says Alicia Malone, correspondent for the movie ticketing website Fandango and author of the upcoming Backwards & In Heels: The Past, Present and Future of Women Working in Film (out Aug. 1). On July 21, the similarly raucous Girls Trip, starring Queen Latifah, Jada Pinkett Smith, Tiffany Haddish and Regina Hall, hits theaters, sending its foursome to New Orleans for let-loose antics. Girls Trip is co-written by a female screenwriter, Tracy Oliver, while Rough Night is the first R-rated studio comedy to be directed by a woman in 20 years (the last was 1998’s Half
Baked, directed by Tamra Davis), a fact Anielle calls “more depressing than encouraging.”
History shows women line up for R-rated comedies that reflect them in a nuanced, real way, while mixing in hysterics. According to PostTrak, comScore/ Screen Engine’s audience survey,
Bad Moms boasted a 72% female audience, Trainwreck had a 61% female audience and this year’s
Snatched attracted a crowd that was 68% women to fill its seats. Yet despite Rough Night and
Girls Trip snagging spots on Fandango’s list of the top five mostanticipated comedies for audiences this summer, the tired question — are women funny? — seems to persist. Dergarabedian calls the genre of female-based comedies “the Rodney Dangerfield of movies. They just can’t get no respect.”
But every hit edges the industry forward, and as talents like Haddish, Latifah, Glazer, McKinnon, Schumer, Leslie Jones and Melissa McCarthy (whose Dangerfield-esque Life of the Party is in the works) flex, the success stories continue to reshape the Hollywood landscape.
“As studios trust stories about women to open at the box office on a consistent basis, we will see more of these,” says Silverstein. “They’re starting to get the message that women are a reliable audience, and it’s only up from here.”