As Paramount gears up for the theatrical release of its The Naked Gun revival in August, the future of scripted comedy was under scrutiny at the AVP Summit producers’ event in northern Italy on Wednesday.
Former Paramount exec Gary Lucchesi, who oversaw the production of the original The Naked Gun movies the 1990s, chaired the talk, having suggested the topic on the basis of his own desire to see comedies back on the big screen again.
He was joined by The Idea Of You producer Jordana Mollick, co-founder of comedy-focused Semi-Formal Productions with filmmaker Michael Showalter; Funny or Die execs Mike Farah and Joe Farrell as well as Italian producer Verdiana Bixio, whose company Publispei is currently filming a reboot of the popular comedy show I Cesaroni.
Mollick, who is riding high on the streaming success of Anne Hathaway romcom The Idea Of You, revealed that upcoming Christmas comedy Oh. What. Fun starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Michelle Pfeiffer and Felicity Jones is also destined for a platform release on Amazon Prime under Semi-Formal Productions first look deal with Amazon MGM Studios.
“It’s like Home Alone, but the mother instead of the child gets left behind,” she said. “It was always intended to be streaming… The Idea Of You was a movie that a lot of people believe would have been a huge success theatrically, but we don’t know. We don’t have comedies in the theaters to really know how they can do.”
She suggested that the streaming versus streaming choice was not necessarily genre specific, noting that Semi-Formal Productions’ other upcoming release Verity, adapted from Colleen Hoover’s best-selling thriller, is destined for the big screen.
“It’s based on a huge, successful Colleen Hoover book and they know that there’s a built-in huge audience for it,” she said. “If it seems like a big event piece, they will, but an original Christmas movie… not really.”
Farrell suggested there was a disconnect with the rising popularity of live stand-up comic events and the demise of comedies in cinema theatres.
“The comedy movie, the scripted comedy business and television, streaming and movies is definitely challenged,” he said. “Jordana, Michael, they have a lot of opportunities, but I think the number of projects being made has really dipped.
“At the same time, we’re seeing standup comedy having a massive boom in the United States. Standups are selling out sports arenas. There’s this cognitive dissonance we feel as producers, where you see a desire for tens of thousands of people to get together and laugh as a community to someone on stage, and yet we are hearing from the buying community and streamers that comedy isn’t a priority and that people don’t want to see it together.”
Ferrell also noted how studios were increasingly slipping comedy elements into other big screen genres.
“Making a movie costs so much money now and it’s so risky that in America, theater or movie buyers tend to think, ‘We’ll make a superhero movie and then we’ll put comedians in it, so there’ll be funny aspects to Deadpool and Guardians of the Galaxy. Those movies legitimately are funny but they’re trying to be a lot of things to everyone so that they can make a billion dollars,” he said.
“We grew up in a business where you were finding comedic voices, and being able to champion them on much smaller budgets, but then they had a chance, occasionally, to become sort of cultural touch points for a lot of us.”
Farah pointed to the fact that younger audiences and creators were looking to other formats as vehicle for comedy.
“There are so many other ways to create now with the event of digital content online… there is an amazing development system… but what’s happened in the last 10 years or so is that the development system for convenience has really shifted, and it’s gone away from scripted collaboration and more towards self-documentation and becoming a branded personality,” he said.
He said that he and Farrell still saw an opportunity, however, in the communal experience of watching comedy together.
“It’s similar to horror films. When you go to a horror film, it always gets harder when you’re hearing other people scream, than if you’re sitting at home… I think if we’re successful in reorienting younger talent and established talent to start thinking about movies again, I think that there’s a moment in time where theatrical comedies can really bring people together again, especially because in the U.S.”
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