Comedy films used to dominate theaters. Not only were they more frequently released, they would bring in big numbers at the box office. Huge stars would headline comedy movies and comedy movies would create big stars. They were reliable as hell. Now, they mostly do well if they star two A-list celebrities playing long-running franchise characters. Vince Vaughn lamented this shift while eating spicy wings.
Few stars have had as significant a presence in comedy films as Vince Vaughn did. Vaughn ran the comedy table in the aughts. He appeared in hit after hit, cementing himself as a comedy star. Yes, he’d appear in the occasional dud, but funny movies were so much more prolific that it did not matter. He could step back, figure out his next move, and pretend like Fred Claus never happened.
Now, it’s not so easy. If a comic book or big IP movie fails, you can still expect three more to follow it within a month. If a comedy or original movie fails, it’s seen as an indictment of those kinds of films. It’s a damn shame. The movie business needs diversity, not just in who works on the films but in what is being made. Instead, Hollywood execs continue to push out the same old same old. Vince Vaughn thinks he knows why.
While sitting across from Sean Evans and munching on spicy wings, Vaughn got into why he doesn’t get to make R-rated comedies anymore. “They just overthink it,” Vaughn explained. “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 cited Battleship as an example of something that was just a “vehicle for storytelling.”
Vaughn’s criticism extended to the executives in charge. While actors may lose work because they appeared in a dud, the same doesn’t extend to the bigwigs anymore. “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,” Vaughn told Evans. “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?’”
Still, Vaughn doesn’t think this is the end for big-screen comedy. “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 mused. “I think you’re going to see more of it in the film space sooner than later, would be my guess.” Fingers crossed, Vince! While I had fun at Deadpool And Wolverine, I’d love to see a big-screen comedy that doesn’t need 20 minutes of forced exposition.