The fast-talking comedic actor of many comedy classics has opened up about why studios are less interested in the genre nowadays.
Comedies, like horror movies, were usually an easy bet in Hollywood with the way their budgets could be kept humble and still end up being big moneymakers. Movies like Borat or Judd Apatow movies or the 21 Jump Street films could compete with summer tentpole films, and while there would still be an occasional R-rated comedy released here and there, they seem to be emigrating to mostly streamers. Vince Vaughn would be a name who you would usually see on the marquee for these R-rated comedy releases. The star of Swingers, Old School and Wedding Crashers would appear on the latest episode of Hot Ones, where he explained how Hollywood shuns his brand of irreverent comedies.
According to Deadline, as Vaughn took the hot wings challenge, he would explain, “They just overthink it. And it’s like, it’s crazy, you get these rules, like, if you did geometry, and you said 87 degrees was a right angle, then all your answers are messed up, instead of 90 degrees. So there became some idea or concept, like, they would say something like, ‘You have to have an IP.’”
Vaughn would then cite Battleship as meaningless IP that studios only used as a “vehicle for storytelling” just because it was a recognizable name. He would go on to say that life experience was a bigger draw for storytelling back when he started to break into the business, as juxtaposed to today’s studio mindset, “The people in charge don’t want to get fired more so than they’re looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate. But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game Payday, so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’”
The star of the upcoming show Bad Monkey does feel optimistic about comedy’s future at the cinema, “People want to laugh, people want to look at stuff that feels a little bit like it’s, you know, dangerous or pushing the envelope,” Vaughn said. “I think you’re going to see more of it in the film space sooner than later, would be my guess.”