Bring Back the Studio Comedy

During an appearance on Hot Ones this month, Melissa McCarthy was asked about the scarcity of theatrical comedies coming out of Hollywood. It’s an appropriate question to pose to one of the 21st century’s greatest comedic actors: It wasn’t long ago that Bridesmaids, The Heat, and Spy were each pulling in hundreds of millions at the box office with McCarthy as the main draw. (Bridesmaids, which also netted McCarthy an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress, is the oldest of these films and was released in the halcyon days of 2011.) “Somehow, the new logline is that comedies don’t work,” McCarthy said. “I think bad comedies don’t work. I think bad movies don’t work. But I will fight to my last breath, which will be in about four more wings, that comedies are important, and I think it brings people together.”

While the evolving nature of comedy is epitomized by a chicken wing YouTube show’s evolution into a staple for celebrities who are promoting their latest projects—no shade to Hot Ones, which gets more insight from A-listers than anyone on late-night television—the fact that major studios have almost completely abandoned the genre is genuinely discombobulating. Comedies have been crowded out of theaters to such an extent that a film like No Hard Feelings, released on Friday, feels burdened by outsized expectations. Starring Jennifer Lawrence as a woman who decides to “date” a wealthy couple’s introverted son before he heads off to college—she’d get a car in return, which would allow her to drive for Uber to pay off her property taxes—No Hard Feelings wouldn’t seem out of place in the heyday of aughts comedies like Superbad and The Hangover. In 2023, however, No Hard Feelings is one of the only R-rated studio comedies of its kind coming out this summer. It’s a predicament that helps explain why the director and cowriter of No Hard Feelings, Gene Stupnitsky, thanked Sony Pictures’ executives at the film’s premiere in New York for even bringing it to theaters, as if releasing a comedy with a hugely popular star were an act of bravery in and of itself.

Unfortunately for comedy lovers, No Hard Feelings isn’t quite allaying concerns about whether the genre is still capable of lighting up the box office, grossing $15 million in its opening weekend against a production budget of $45 million. Strong word of mouth could potentially carry No Hard Feelings to solid profitability, but it would be hard-pressed to match the box office of something like Superbad, which seems to confirm Hollywood’s worst fears for the genre.

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It’s still hard to fathom how we’ve reached this point with the studio comedy. For one, there are plenty of movies arriving in theaters that have humor baked into their DNA: Your mileage on the Marvel Cinematic Universe may vary, but one of the biggest selling points is that its superheroes can land a few zingers in between saving the world. Even this year’s Best Picture winner, Everything Everywhere All at Once, has extended sequences intended to elicit laughs from the audience. (Shout-out to the guy who did an entire fight scene battling Michelle Yeoh over a butt plug.)

So if moviegoers still have an appetite for comedy in the films they choose to pay a ticket for, what gives? There are a couple of factors at play that have hamstrung the studio comedy. It’s certainly not a coincidence that the big-screen drop-off has coincided with the rise of streaming services, which have used lucrative deals to get comedy stars to make movies for them. (See: Adam Sandler and Kevin Hart, who both signed up to work with Netflix.) As a result, the star-driven comedy vehicles that were once reliable box office hits have migrated to streamers, whether it’s the latest projects from Will Ferrell (Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga for Netflix; Spirited for Apple TV+) or even McCarthy (Superintelligence for the streamer formerly known as HBO Max; Thunder Force for Netflix). When audiences become conditioned to expect a certain type of film to land on a streamer, it’s an uphill battle to bring them back to theaters—just ask Pixar.

Unfortunately, studios haven’t done much to stop comedy’s exodus to streaming, in part because the genre doesn’t always align with their financial interests. Nowadays, studios spend most of their time catering to international markets in the hopes of turning a larger profit from their tentpoles. (If you ever wondered why there have been so many crappy Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean sequels, it’s because they make bank overseas.) American comedies don’t tend to perform well in other countries, unless the humor is easily translated through, say, the guise of an action-packed blockbuster. (One recent example: the rebooted Jumanji franchise, starring Dwayne Johnson, Hart, Jack Black, and Karen Gillan.) This trend extends to popular subgenres like the romantic comedy, which have also faltered at the box office, leading to (who else?) Netflix cornering the market for these films.

The dire state of the studio comedy has far-reaching implications for the filmmakers behind these movies, too. It means that someone like Greg Mottola, the director of Superbad, had to settle for no marketing push for his latest project, Confess, Fletch, in its limited theatrical release last year. This was despite the fact that the movie garnered strong reviews and featured a winning lead performance from Jon Hamm. (The film, which had a modest production budget of $20 million, was simultaneously made available on premium VOD.) “I really don’t have any issue with [the movie’s distributor, Miramax],” Mottola said last year in an interview with Uproxx. “I think they can’t see a way around how to make that profitable as a theatrical experience, without just spending more money. … That doesn’t make sense.” Really, the best path for comedy filmmakers these days might be to follow in the footsteps of Adam McKay, who parlayed his success with Ferrell-led comedies like Step Brothers and Talladega Nights into making dramas with a humorous bent that land on the Oscars’ radar. (Considering that Vice and Don’t Look Up are by far McKay’s worst movies, it’s not exactly an encouraging development.)

Thankfully, a handful of studio comedies released in recent years have proved that the genre can still have broad appeal for audiences and be profitable. Last year, The Lost City managed to gross just under $200 million thanks in part to the star power of Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum. A similar formula allowed Ticket to Paradise, an old-school rom-com headlined by Julia Roberts and George Clooney, to collect nearly $170 million at the box office in spite of mixed reviews. Along with earning more than $115 million, 2018’s Game Night is the best ensemble comedy of the past five years—I will die on the hill that the film was Jesse Plemons’s apex mountain—and allowed its filmmakers, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, to level up to helming Paramount’s charming Dungeons & Dragons adaptation. Girls Trip didn’t just prove that we need more Black- and female-led ensemble comedies: It was the only R-rated comedy that crossed the $100 million threshold domestically in 2017. These success stories may be overshadowed by box office bombs (Late Night, Bros, Like a Boss) and the many projects still going straight to streamers, but they also underline that studios could do far worse than taking more chances on mid-budget comedies—especially when they don’t have to gross the same amount as a Marvel movie to turn a healthy profit.

No Hard Feelings might not have taken the box office by storm in its opening weekend, but you have to commend Stupnitsky and Lawrence for making it in the first place. Sadly, the movie already feels like an anomaly: a reminder of the crowd-pleasers that were theatrical staples as recently as a decade ago and that have nearly gone extinct as studios single-mindedly pursue superhero movies, remakes, and other IP extensions. It’s hard to put an actual value on what would happen if films like No Hard Feelings continued bypassing theaters for streaming services—there’s just something about the communal experience of seeing a comedy that can never be replicated at home. Losing them would be no laughing matter.