Is the studio comedy dead, dying, or simply hiding out?
Photo-Illustration: Vulture, Netflix, HBO Max, Universal Pictures, Focus Features and Hulu Long before COVID-19 curve-flattening measures jammed the revolving doors of movie theaters across the United States, the fate of the laugh-out-loud comedy was unsettled. Once cineplex attractions, funny films have, over the past several years, seemed more likely to premiere in the confines of your living room than in a darkened, popcorn-littered auditorium.
A bigger problem has been that people seem to need to feel a sense of urgency to buy a ticket to the theaters these days — at least they did back when theaters were a thing. There’s been an obvious struggle to make comedies feel like the kinds of events that superhero movies are — not just enjoyable but unmissable. The pandemic has made it clear that studios have been more than ready to surrender on the genre for a while now.
It doesn’t have to be Eurovision. It can be anything. I mean, I like a gentle, warm, humanist, uplifting, droll, cuddly, insightful comedy as much as the next person, but I also really like to laugh like an idiot in a room full of strangers. Like when I went to see the 2015 remake of Vacation one afternoon on its opening day, in a sparsely attended theater. The movie had already gotten savaged by critics and was about to get demolished at the box office.
Will Ferrell’s latest laugh-out-loud comedy premiered on Netflix earlier this summer. Photo: Netflix AW: I was lucky enough to get to see Palm Springs in a theater, when it was the last movie I saw at Sundance back in January and back in a whole other reality.
Perhaps I’m exaggerating, but I’m not exaggerating. There’s something dead-eyed, lifeless, and cruel about the world we now inhabit, and I feel like the part where we all decided comedies weren’t worth seeing in movie theaters anymore might actually be one of the forks in the road we may want to revisit.
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