What happened to the R rated studio comedy? In the UK this was generally 15 or maybe an 18 certificate. In this first part, I’ll talk about the DVD market and how American Comedy fares overseas.
In the 2000s and 2010s we had The Hangover trilogy, Old School, Bridesmaids, Horribles Bosses 1 & 2, then later Baywatch, and Tag.
Did Studios lose their nerve and decide, via their corporate owners that they didn’t want to run the risk of offending anybody? Or was it audiences who decided otherwise?
It seems like it was a combination of things, really.
Economics, audience habits changed, culture shifted.
I don’t think it was just that audiences became too “woke”, or studios became too scared to offend people. That’s more likely news reporting based on assumptions.
It seems like the R rated comedy just became harder for Studios to make money from.
1. The DVD market died
This seems like it was a major contributing factor.
R-Rated movies didn’t have to become billion-dollar hits in order to succeed. Here are some numbers.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin made $177.4 million gross at the box office against a budget of $26 million.
Hollywood accounting says a film needs to be 2.5 times it’s budget in order to be successful. So for The 40-Year-Old Virgin that figured would’ve been $65 million. Instead it made 6.8 times its budget.
The box office figure I found doesn’t breakdown how much of that was through DVD versus theatrical.
In this era, a studio could make a comedy for $30–50 million that would:
- do decent theatrical business
- maybe explode on DVD
- became a cable regular
- generate years of ancillary revenue
DVD was how I discovered The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Old School, and Austin Powers, to name a few. Let’s look at Superbad written buy Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, directed by Greg Mottola, and produced by Judd Apatow.
Box Office Mojo lists its budget as $20 million. It’s total world wide box office was $170,066,118.
According to the website Stat Significant $141 million of that was in DVD sales.
CNBC reports in an article titled “The death of the DVD: Why sales dropped more than 86% in 13 years” that that decline has happened since 2008.
And “since 2011, platforms like Netflix, Hulu and HBO have seen sales balloon 1,231% to $12.9 billion.”
2. Comedy doesn’t travel internationally
Action, Superheroes, and Dinosaurs travel.
Jokes often don’t.
Let me clarify, verbal humor often doesn’t.
A joke borne out of American culture, like a pop culture reference, or wordplay may not land in somewhere like Japan, Brazil, Germany, or China.
A film like The Hangover was a massive worldwide hit, but it was the exception. There are always exceptions.
Side note, back in the day, physical comedy traveled. Definitely Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd and Langdon. Even Jerry Lewis had a lot of physical and visual gags. Even to the modern day, Rowan Atkinson played Mr. Bean, popular on TV and then later with the two films the first was in 1997, and the second ten years later. The physical humor definitely helped Jim Carrey’s and Adam Sandler’s early movies.
A film like Jurassic World earns most of its money overseas. You don’t need to speak English to understand big proto-chicken monsters. So as studios became increasingly dependent on international box office, they shifted toward genres that worked everywhere. Action and horror can work pretty much anywhere.
Hollywood is risk averse and by that I mean the risk isn’t offensive jokes, it’s revenue. They’d rather sink mega millions into a blockbuster in the hope they’re going to make mega millions back.
That said, Seth Rogen seems to have pretty much still been able to get similar small budget he’d get back in the day. I say small, it’s still multiple millions. But that’s no longer the norm.
The other thing that happened was that Marvel, in particular, began to use more and more humor (American spelling) in their films. Look at 2024’s Deadpool & Wolverine. That was R rated, had a $533.7 million budget and took $1.338 billion at the box office. And was funny as hell.
So, even I can see from a business stand point having a big superhero movie that’s also really funny, is a no brainer.