In Pictures: This Year's Comedy Winners And Losers
Not So Funny Men
By Dorothy Pomerantz
11.12.07, 6:08 PM ET
Los Angeles -
In a holiday season with few blockbusters, Fred Claus seemed a sure
bet for Warner Bros., Vince Vaughn stars as Santa's no-good older
brother who comes to the North Pole to learn a little something about
family. In the wake of his back-to-back hits, Wedding Crashers and The
Break-Up, Vaughn was paid a reported $20 million for the role. But as
the film opened over the weekend, studio executives faced a Grinchy
third-place finish in the box office derby, raking in just $19.2
million, not even enough to cover Vaughn's salary. Reviews were tepid,
and parents opted to take their children to Jerry Seinfeld's week-old
Bee Movie rather than watching Vaughn party with the elves. Warner
Bros. points out that several other recent holiday films, including
Elf and The Polar Express, opened poorly but went on to become big
money makers.
But there's no denying it's been a bad year for big-budget comedies.
Evan Almighty, staring Steve Carell as a modern-day Noah, was supposed
to be a high-grossing follow-up to megahit Bruce Almighty. Instead,
the $175 million film has earned only $172 million worldwide,
according to Box Office Mojo. Throw in the $25 million cost of
marketing a movie like this, and it remains well in the red. The $40
million film The Heartbreak Kid, for which Ben Stiller earned a
reported $15 million, has grossed a paltry $77 million so far this
year.
In Pictures: This Year's Comedy Winners And Losers
At the same time, bargain-basement comedies with no name stars pulled
in big bucks. Superbad, a $20 million film about two high school boys
trying to get booze for a party, earned $162 million. Knocked Up,
about a lovable loser who impregnates a woman way out of his league,
cost $30 million and earned $216 million.
What those two films have in common is Judd Apatow. Since directing
and writing The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005, he has become a studio
darling, putting out cheap, funny films that earn five to seven times
their budgets. Over the next two years, he is producing or writing six
films for Columbia Pictures, Paramount and Universal.
An added pain for studios is that comedies, even ones that do
relatively well domestically, are hard to market overseas. Funny
doesn't always translate. Wild Hogs, the highest-grossing comedy of
the year, with $253 million in worldwide box office revenues, earned
34% of its gross overseas. By contrast, the third Pirates of the
Caribbean movie earned 68% of its $961 million in worldwide box office
revenues overseas.
So will studios continue to pay big names big bucks for movies that
don't add to the bottom line?
"You'll definitely see them rethinking," says Chad Hartigan, a box
office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "Any time the studios see
something like Apatow's movies making money and something else not
making money, they're going to rethink."
There are already signs that things are changing. Jim Carrey, who
regularly earns upwards of $15 million per comedy, has reportedly
agreed to take no money upfront for his next film, Yes Man, instead
opting for a 36% cut of whatever the film earns after it breaks even.
The move could be seen as an extreme sign of Carrey's faith that the
movie will actually make money, or a shrewd move by the studios to get
the struggling actor for nothing.
And Adam Sandler, whose I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry earned a
respectable $183 million, has jumped on the Apatow bandwagon. He'll
star in the director's 2008 film, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, about
a Mossad agent who fakes his death to become a New York City
hairdresser.
In Pictures: This Year's Comedy Winners And Losers
Posted by Orikinla Osinachi. at 9:49 AM
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