A few highlights from the last decade — Booksmart is a very different take on the teenage buddy comedy. Jojo Rabbit and The Death of Stalin are some of the darkest black comedies I've ever watched, which would never have gotten made in the 90s. Birdman is completely surreal. The Grand Budapest Hotel is one of most joyous films to watch I know of, and The Artist is a comedic love letter to the silent era.
The notion that people can't be funny anymore just because they can no longer use particular groups as punchlines is just lazy. A great example is Get Out. It's a lot of things, but it can reasonably be called a comedy: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2017/11/jordan-peele-ge...
Or look at Sorry to Bother You: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorry_to_Bother_You
I thought both of these movies were hilarious, and they worked with extremely "challenging" social topics.
As an old, when people start talking about movies were only funny back in the day, I suspect they just imprinted on whatever was funny in their youth. Time moves on, and humor has to move with it.
In 2018 when I originally got AMC A-list subscription, I tried going to 3 movie a week at first, so I went to a lot more movies I was unsure about but they were very original and memorable, but they weren’t super popular (at least I was the only person I personally knew who had seen it).
Sorry to Bother You ($18 million)
Blackkklansman ($93 million)
Eighth Grade ($14 million)
Crazy Rich Asians ($238 million)
Fifth highest grossing film of 2017
Sequel did very well as well
Those were great films, however, they were niche.
'Superbad' was a big, hollywood thing. A cultural touchstone that we remember, make jokes about, memes.
Very few people ever saw Booskmart or The Death of Stalin.
The Globalization of Hollywood - and increased cultural sensitivities have changed this.
Comedy doesn't cross borders as well as Thor.
Without going into details, cultural sensitivities and fear of Twitter mobs is a 'fundamental' issue. It's not a side issue it's a primary driver. Have a listen to the podcasts and talks by various comedy writers, you can see the evolution.
People with power have their knives out to destroy others - some of them obviously need to be cancelled, and some others raise some questions, but there are very, very few left with the power to make the jokes they want. Everyone else has to kowtow in fear. Comedy requires 'absolute safe spaces' in order to work, particularly writers rooms, which, if we could record what they say ... my god we'd all be offended.
I'm hoping that this will just be a 'phase' but I'm afraid it may not be as the issues overlay with ostensibly historical issues of social justice, and as soon as we broach that domain, everything becomes deadly serious and we all act like good corporate citizens.
It may very well take an established 'provider' like a different kind of Netflix with a different set of sensibilities.
Edit: listen to Tina Fey and Judd Apatow podcasts and less public interviews, they hint at the shift while being very polite about it.
The Artist: $130M gross, $15M budget
Knives Out: $311M gross, $40M budget
Birdman: $100M gross, $18M budget
Grand Budapest: $173M gross, $25M budget
Midnight in Paris: $154M gross, $17M budget
Superbad: $170M gross, $20M budget
Compare Grand Budapest and Birdman, which only saw 40% of their takings in NA. Midnight in Paris comes in at 37%, and, as a European production, The Artist saw only 35%-ish of its revenue in NA. Even Knives Out, the most hollywood-y of the lot, came in at 53% revenue from NA.
Superbad is a Hollywood movie with Hollywood sensibilities, so it obviously performed best in the US, and it's obviously become a cultual touchstone there — but I personally only even heard about it relatively recently. All the other films performed much better elsewhere so obviously don't seem to have had as much of a cultural impact from a US-centric perspective.
1) Superbad was sleeper hit - it did well in the theatres but far better in the long run. It launched a bunch of careers into the mainstream. It's also a broad comedy.
It was no more or less 'Hollywood' than the films you listed.
2) The films you listed are mostly Oscar Winners - which get a massive, global boost from that kind of exposure. They're also 100% 'artsy' kind of comedies made by highly respected auteurs - they're not broad comedies like Airplane or Animal House (or Superbad).
3) They're also mostly from the 2000's era, in which the general point is being made about 'challenging to make comedies' these days.
4) I don't think the box office differential rally helps that much as conceivably Superbad is going to naturally appeal a little bit more to North American audiences for the reasons you stated.
Here is a Hollywood reporter take on it [1] the decline of comedy is not a controversial idea.
"It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise. "
"The studios have backed away from comedies, just as they have mid-budget dramas, perceiving both as far harder to sell than tentpoles. "
"Even a comedy superstar like Will Ferrell has had trouble getting movies made. “It’s becoming a little finicky,” he told the podcast Armchair Expert in early June. “I’ve recently come across things where I thought, ‘Boy, what a great idea,’ and went around town and everyone just went, ‘Nope.’ “"
...
[1] https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/comedy-b...
The films listed above are not 'broad comedies' they're comedy/dramas.
I'm not sure of the 'Mel Brooks is not an argument' (link in one of the responses) is a defence at all, because the fact is, he took excessive risks while trying to make a point, risks which would not be made today.
He was Jewish and took on very serious issues with Nazis ... but he definitely was not Black, and Blazing Saddles ... wold be too much for today.
By all accounts, Tropic Thunder would not get made today because of the ostensibly 'blackface' character - I think that's a really good 'threshold' to analyze because while I don't think the character is generally offensive and most wouldn't see it as that - but it's definitely going to be for some, to the point where Execs just couldn't back making the movie. There's going to be guaranteed outrage, and that outrage, if the press decides to amplify it, will kill a film and have all the parties involved running scared with apologies.
The Kids in the Hall (Kevin McDonald) indicated they couldn't make what they made today. They did indicate they got pushback back in the day from some of their bits that mocked religion - particularly from the US - but they still got to make it, which is the point.
Casting for any role which involves 'mixed' anything is a minefield which risks overthrowing a project. The casting of Cleopatra (who was Macedonian), caused controversy by people speaking on behalf of ... Ancient Egyptians? Whom even modern Egyptians could hardly make a claim to?
There's a lot of good talk about having more people from different backgrounds in roles, and especially have them among rank and file production, which is obviously good, but this should be a different theme from say, what jokes are acceptable and not.
Those are different kinds of issues that are getting crossed up in a cacophony of Twitter noise.
HBO, Disney and Netflix are not interested in creative expression, they're inserted in products, broader audiences, and films that speak to their choice narratives. If you listen to some podcasts you can hear the opinions of these executives themselves speak about it. These are not your 'creativity first' type of people.
Cable TV has always allowed for a narrow set of channels that challenged conventions, kind of a 'Late Night Loophole' in which naughty stuff was tolerated. We need this equivalent for streaming sources. We need an 'Adult Swim' version of Netflix that invests heavily in outrageous things.
Casting: I don’t remember a time when casting didn’t cause the hate mobs to go haywire. When Noma Dumezweni was cast as Hermione Granger people went nuts. Some historians raised issue with the fact that Xerxes II was acted by a black man in the movie 300 despite being Persian. And I’m sure casting a black man as Judas in Jesus Christ Superstar was equally controversial. Now in the era of people realizing how much representation matters, of course it is going to cause controversy if you hire an actor to play a role of a underrepresented group while the actor does not belong to said group. This didn’t used to be the case, but it is today. However this has such an obvious solution that I doubt it has hindered the production of a single movie.
> "It’s been a decade since any comedy launched a blockbuster franchise."
The times change. At one point hiring a white actor to play a black role did not stir a huge controversy, now it does. Franchises come into fashion, people get tired of them, creators move on. Just because comedy franchises aren’t big today, it doesn’t mean they are not possible. More likely is that people have seen enough sequels in other genres that they don’t want to see Baby Driver 2 no more then they like to see Dump and Dumber 5. And I think for a reason, comedy sequels tend to be pretty shitty (and I guess it makes sense, how often can you tell the same joke before it stops being funny).
I think you are over-reading into the twitter mobs. I don’t think they have as much power as you give them credit for. I think the biggest achievement of the twitter mob in the film industry was to give Sonic the Hedgehog a makeover. I don’t know of a single example where a comedy was cancelled because twitter didn’t like it. And I think comedies get made today just like they did yesteryear. And I think producers of comedies had to be careful about the subject matter before just like today. And I think they stirred controversies before, and they will continue to do so, irregardless of the political climate.
... but I am I am listening to Conan O'Brian's podcast with Sean Penn at this very instant and they've literally brought up the challenges of comedy writing in cancel culture. Literally today's episode.
These are comedy/acting figureheads discussing the problem, so I'll take the word that it's an issue.
Casting is far more controversial that it's ever been, with an ever developing set of rules for who can play what under what terms. 'Progress' in the 1960's was allowed more expansive casting, i.e. breaking taboos. We are now in the process of establishing taboos.
Sean Penn just said 'I would not be allowed to play Harvey Milk in today's climate'. He then indicated that it's important to support people who have not had opportunities, but said in private conversations (this would be Hollywood 'elite' - Sean Penn is extremely connected) - the view is universal that anyone should be allowed to play anyone and that it's only on podiums on TV do the more radical voices come out. He and Conan then both agreed to terminology as 'Virtue Signalling'. It's a thoughtful discussion I recommend the podcast episode.
Kevin Hart was cancelled for the Oscars and that's a 'huge' thing as it's a global brand and they were left without a host. They've made all sorts of adjustments due to popular outrage. Just as a quick example.
It's not so much 'cancellation' as the mobs influence over the very sensitive Studio Execs and their various decisions.
Superbad would not get made today. It could (if they cleaned it up a bit) but it's just not thematically right: it's way too young white guy, crude, the tranny jokes, the 'girl on period jokes' - it just wouldn't make it past the ideation stage. Seth Rogen is now doing 'Social Progress' movies aka 'Long Shot' with definitive feminist values. Nothing wrong with that at all (it was modestly funny) - other than to say - that's what's being made instead of Superbad.
Tropic Thunder is comedy genius and it simply could not get made because of the main character's blackface, and the other major characters portrayal of mentally handicapped people. They couldn't adjust the script around that. So forget 'ideation' even if it was pitched it would be a 'no go'.
The Hollywood system is very sensitive these things and all sorts of deviations are made. A lot of it is good spirit, but a lot of it is just suffocating.
I guess Spike Lee (Blackkklansman, 2018), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You, 2018), Taika Waititi (Jojo Rabbit, 2019), etc. are one of the few people left with the power to make the jokes they want. Or are those not the kinds of jokes you were thinking about?
(TW: next paragraph) I get the sense that you are simply wrong about this. I don’t know of any examples where a good comedy was ‘cancelled’ because of a twitter mob. If you are afraid that the era of the prison rape joke is over, then I hate to brake it to you, that joke was never funny, and even if it was, it certainly isn’t any more[1].