By Joshua Tyler
| Published
Quietly, and while no one was looking, an entire movie genre was wiped from existence. Now it’s back. This weekend, the new version of The Naked Gun opened in theaters, and it’s the first big comedy movie to be released in eight years.
The last full comedy of significance to show up at the cinema was Daddy’s Home 2, released in 2017. And then Hollywood banned comedy.
Daddy’s Home 2 was a legitimate hit. Its all-star cast included Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, John Lithgow, John Cena, and Mel Gibson. Audiences loved it and gave the movie high scores. It made good money at the box office, earning $180 million on a $70 million budget.
I’m telling you this so you know that there was nothing about Daddy’s Home 2 to suggest that big comedy movies were no longer a good investment. Quite the opposite. They were easy to make and easy to profit from. So what happened?
I’ve heard some try to blame COVID, but that’s not it, since COVID happened in 2020 and comedy movies died in 2017.
The number of comedies produced had gradually slowed by 2017. In 2015, nearly a dozen big-budget comedies were in theaters, led by movies like Ted 2, Paul Blart 2, and the original Daddy’s Home. In 2016, that number dropped to less than half a dozen, with Central Intelligence, Bad Moms, and Neighbors 2 as the most notable entries.
Although the number of comedies released dwindled, the money was still significant. Central Intelligence alone made $226 million. Still, in 2017 comedy went away.
It sputtered briefly back to life in 2023 when Jennifer Lawrence tried to release an R-rated raunch comedy called No Hard Feelings. In response, the press attacked her for it, and she hasn’t appeared in anything since. It’s like she was run out of the business.
That’s exactly why there haven’t been any comedies. No Hard Feelings was called creepy and tone deaf for daring to exist. The film, which is about a hot middle-aged girl taking a teen nerd under her wing, was accused of promoting toxic masculinity and was deemed an affront to the #MeToo movement.
The few normal people who did see it loved it. The movie holds an 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. But activist-driven backlash in the press buried the film, which barely registered at the box office.
That attack on Lawrence and No Hard Feelings is exactly what Hollywood has been avoiding for the past eight years, by refusing to make comedy. It’s the reason for everything, and given what happened to Lawrence, it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t the right business decision.
I’m not as sure it was the right cultural decision. It’s been eight years without laughter at a time when, perhaps more than at any other time in recent history, people needed a laugh.
Now The Naked Gun is in theaters, but it’s not an act of bravery. It’s an act of timing. The anti-humor mentality that took hold of the entertainment press has begun evaporating, and The Naked Gun is first to take advantage of the changing environment.
Whether The Naked Gun does well at the box office is almost irrelevant since the past eight years have proven that Hollywood is making comedy decisions based on the changing forms of political bias expressed by the media, and not on profit. That media orthodoxy, which forbade us from laughing for eight years, seems to have embraced The Naked Gun.
The gatekeepers have opened the gates and allowed us all to laugh. I’m glad comedy is back, but no one should be happy about how it happened. Tear down the gates; we can’t let this happen again.
