I like the theory that red letter media came up with that Adam Sandler movies are just giant schemes to skim money off the top of overblown production costs and go on vacations with his washed up SNL buddies.
Yeah extremely critical support to Adam Sandler for getting his friends paid big and paid vacations by scamming film studios into making his awful movies.
The thing is, it's not even a scam. His movies make money (fucking somehow?), so the studios are getting exactly what they're paying for. The only people who lose out are consumers and film workers who don't want to manufacture shit even if it nets them a paycheck.
It's kind of a huge scam where everyone is in on it and it is hard to even tell where the scam begins and ends and who exactly is being scammed lol
I think it's one of those deals where the people buying the movie aren't doing it for themselves. Whenever I've seen anyone put one of these movies on, it's always a situation like grandma feels obligated to show a movie, and thinks a comedy isn't likely to offend or bore anyone, and that's what's available so that's what she plays. Nobody complains because that would be rude and it's not so bad you can't just ignore it.
They somehow actually lose money. Hollywood accounting is a fuck and studios will sink tonnes of money into a flop to balance out the taxes or royalites from successful movies. Adam Sandler movies generally have a way way higher budget than what you see on screen, they could make them for hundreds of millions less and you wouldn't notice. But that money is part of the budget which can be levied against box office gains to make your year end profits look better. According to Fox, Star Wars still hasn't made any profit.
Good points on the fuzziness of Hollywood accounting, but a lot of his movies -- even the shit ones -- do make good money. Check this out:
- I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry: $186 million
- You Don't Mess with the Zohan: $203 million
- Bedtime Stories: $221 million
- Grown Ups: $272 million
- Just Go with It: $215 million
- Jack and Jill: $151 million
- Grown Ups 2: $247 million
- Blended: $128 million
- Pixels: $244 million
I'd never even heard of some of those (what the fuck is a Blended?). If each of those movies had a budget of $100 million they'd all be well in the black, and the whole string of movies would be comfortably profitable even if their budgets averaged $150 million. The budget for Pixels is listed on Wikipedia as somewhere between $88-129 million, and if anything that's probably high for his usual project (Grown Ups 2 cost around $80 million, according to the internet).
I don't know who they are, but he has an audience.
These are actually three different types of bad comedy movies. American Pie and it's ripoffs, aging comedians doing bad movies and CGI animal movies.
That's either older comedians doing bad movie or from an earlier time
It seems like the trend went from "dumb Adam Sandler-type comedies" to "Judd Apatow-type awkward comedies".
The Missing link was “Don’t mess with the Zohan,” written by Apatow, starring Sandler
I’m actually thinking about writing a whole effort post on this topic.
I think its essentially that improv sucks and if you build your movie about the actors doing improv dialogue it'll be forgettable.
I like improv (e.g. Whose Line, Middleditch and Schwartz, live improv shows by professionals) but it's a completely different medium from cinematic comedy. When I watch improv, part of the thrill is knowing that it's a live performance and anything could happen, and I'm more interested in watching the process of improvisation than in whether the resulting scene makes any sense.
It's like if you tried to make a feature-length film out of a funny Chapo Trap House episode. Some episodes are funny as podcasts, but I have different expectations from a narrative film.
Oh god, now I'm imagining the chapos selling out and making movies out of their popular bits, like SNL used to do out of their successful skits (even if some of them were actually genuinely good movies, like Blues Brothers or Wayne's World).
A movie about Gorka. Or one about the Presidential Sons' Debate.
It was during this epoch that the Justin Long species rose to prominence.
Dodgeball wasn't a comedy, it was a serious meditation on whether one could dodge a ball.
I will freely admit, I love the Ow! My Balls! segment in Idiocracy, and I don't care if that means I'm one of the "idiots". I love the idea of this fictional universe in which one guy exists for the sole purpose of experiencing pain and humiliation, where the physical laws of the universe conspire towards him getting repeatedly hit in the balls. He gets up every morning, innocent of the absurdity of his own existence, with a positive attitude and goals he wants to achieve, but his lot in life determines that he must suffer repeated traumas to his genitals for other people's amusement. I just wonder what that does to a person and what's going through his mind.
(I mean, the answer to the second question is probably that he's thinking "Ow! My balls!" but whatever.)
I think its because it's the most shared experience with half of humanity that makes it fucking hilarious. I like the one where the Russian rides a pipe down a frozen slope over an edge and get his grapes popped by the sudden drop
I like well-done sophisticated humor. I also like watching a weight lifter smash his own nuts while lifting a kettle bell.
There better be a gulag dedicated just to Sandler and his co-conspirators
> they’re inexpensive, even with big star salaries (Will Ferrell, Ben Stiller, etc) > however most of them still don’t make any money > this is mostly because studios stopped making films with narrative/pathos **and** humour because script readers thought they were “too smart” and instead tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator. Very few of these movies are successful. > It can work - see something like *Dodgeball* where the entire joke is basically people getting hit with various objects and it’s hilarious - however even there its propelled by narrative over jokes. As time went on studios made fewer films like *Dodgeball* and *Old School* and more films like *Semi-Pro* and *Holmes and Watson* > Unable to get projects made, directors like Chapo-extended-universe member Adam McKay turned to more dramatic fare like *The Big Short* > Only people who can get major studio comedies made in todays film climate are really Chris Tucker, a major star so long as it’s “an action comedy” and Judd Apatow > and that’s only because Judd owns a very very successful production company that basically grants him free reign on his own projects. > Netflix still kinda does them with it’s happy madison projects but when was the last time anyone mentioned one of them to you?fun fact - the fact that such movies underperformed so massively in the late 2000s and 2010s is why Will Ferrell was for many years the star with the highest average salary and the lowest average return of investment in the entirety of Hollywood. Studio comedies crashed fucking big time.
https://cn.reuters.com/article/instant-article/idUSTRE5AH5WM20091118
they do ok, just not ok enough.
With the rise of Apatow, comedies started getting bromantic and moralistic
Whoever started "PINGAS" is one of the cleverest people in history.
Barb & Star was probably the closest recent thing I've seen to a bigger studio comedy that edged a little bit absurd and a little bit more memey.
A good exemplar is “How High II”
where the antagonist is
_an evil biotech company in Atlanta :::
adam sandler still goin strong. most of the shit comedie just straight 2 streming now
source: i love to watch dogshit
You must endure the ten bad Sandler comedies to get one good serious film like Uncut Gems.
There are recent American movies that make me laugh, but they tend be either (1) not really in the comedy genre (e.g. some superhero movies are basically comedies, and sometimes they're funny) or (2) animated, e.g. the Lego Movie and its sequel. Other comedies I like tend to be either older (e.g. the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies, Mel Brooks, Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin) or not American (e.g. Edgar Wright's Cornetto trilogy).
There are plenty of American sitcoms I think are pretty good. Comedy relies on good writing, and sitcoms tend to be very writer-driven. But for some reason, when Hollywood makes comedy movies, they think the way to make the movie funny is to have the actors improvise instead of having actual structured jokes.
One of the few capital-C Comedy movies I saw and enjoyed in the last few years was Extreme Job, from South Korea. The premise is, a team of bumbling cops buy a failing chicken restaurant in order to spy on an international drug gang. But they have run the restaurant during the day in order not to blow their cover, and when business picks up, they accidentally find themselves busy running a successful chicken restaurant. I don't think it's a lifechangingly great movie, but it has a decent script, some decent performances, and some actual structured jokes. I really don't think I'm a snob about movies -- I just think that I'm used to seeing such bad comedy movies that Extreme Job excelled simply by reaching the bare minimum of what a comedy should be.
Lol why lie? Old Adam Sandler movies are funny & fun to watch. Little Nickie / Billy Madison / Happy Gilmore will always be classics
