Can big-screen comedy survive the superhero era?
NEW YORK—Days before the opening of the Will FerrellAmy 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 the upcoming “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 has been the Kumail Nanjiani-led, Judd Apatow produced “The Big Sick.” But that LionsgateAmazon release is a specialty one; it’s made $6.8 million in three weeks of limited release.
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 suc-
cesses (“Bad Moms,” “Sausage Party,” “Trainwreck,” “Central Intelligence,” “Spy,”) but it’s been a long while since a cultural sensation like “The 40 YearOld Virgin,” “The Hangover” or “Bridesmaids.”
The downturn begs the question: Can the big-screen comedy survive the superhero era? As studios 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-adverse 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 in Hollywood 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.
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.
“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.’”