Former Amazon Studios head Roy Price noticed some raw data regarding comedies and shared it via Twitter.
Ok, let’s unpack some data here as well.
In 1997, comedies made up 20 percent of the total movie market. In 2003, comedies peaked at 21.4 percent — that year had “Old School,” “Bad Santa,” “The School of Rock,” “Elf,” “Freaky Friday” and “A Mighty Wind.”
By 2020, the comedic market share went down to a record low 3.8 percent. This year, we’re at around 6% and it’ll likely go down with not many comedies being released in the fall.
Have we lost our sense of humor?
What the world needs right now is to laugh, but everything, including the movies, feel so self-serious. Don’t get me wrong, my way of church will always be serious, hard-nosed cinema, but there’s something great and freeing about watching a gut-busting comedy.
In 2019, director Todd Phillips complained that outrage culture killed the big screen comedy. The media attacked him for that. Others have shared Phillips’ sentiments, they’ve also been attacked.
Can you name any American comedies in the last five years that actually made you laugh out loud? I wholeheartedly can’t find more than a few. Our culture has become petrified to take risks and make people laugh.
Comedians like to push and push and push until that very fine line of what is deemed acceptable and unacceptable is somewhat squeezed to its very limit. As George Carlin once said, “It’s a comedian’s duty to find the line and deliberately cross over it.” That, to me at least, is what some of the very best comedy can do.
The truth is, in comedy, there really shouldn’t be a firm line as to what's funny and what's in poor taste, but in our fevered social media reality everyone now loves to immediately point out when they think that line has been crossed.
This has instilled fear in the minds of studio heads who greenlight comedies, not to mention the screenwriters who pen them.
"Tropic Thunder" and “Blazing Saddles” would have Twitter and the media up in a frenzy if released today. The universally positive reviews turned into abhorrently negative ones from scared and shrieking critics afraid to be called racist.
A Twitter user asked Ben Stiller to stop apologizing for his 2008 comedy “Tropic Thunder,” to which the actor firmly responded that he never has and never will. Here’s his reply:
“I make no apologies for Tropic Thunder. Don’t know who told you that. It’s always been a controversial movie since when we opened. Proud of it and the work everyone did on it.”
It’s not like journalists haven’t tried to condemn “Tropic Thunder”. Take note of the bastshit crazy thinking that went into Robbie Collin’s 6.12.20 Telegraph essay, “Let’s Not Kid Ourselves — Tropic Thunder‘s blackface joke is no better than Bo’ Selecta.”
“Are we still allowed to laugh away unthinkingly at Tropic Thunder? Sorry, but no.”
It’s time for fearless filmmakers to bring back the comedy and be unafraid of the repercussions that might come with it.
No official figure has been reported, but best guess is the budget landed somewhere in the $10M range. HBO pre-bought the streaming rights, but that was before David Ellison took over