The R-rated comedy heyday is over.
Vince Vaughn recently appeared on the YouTube interview show “Hot Ones,” where he talked about why Hollywood no longer makes the kinds of R-rated comedies he used to star in.
“They just overthink it,” said Vaughn, 54.
“And it’s like, it’s crazy, you get these rules, like, if you did geometry, and you said 87 degrees was a right angle, then all your answers are messed up, instead of 90 degrees. So there became some idea or concept, like, they would say something like, ‘You have to have an IP.’”
Vaughn, who is currently starring in the Bill Lawrence series “Bad Monkey” (premiering Aug. 14 on AppleTV+), rose to fame starring in R-rated comedies such as “Swingers,” “Old School,” co-starring Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson, “Wedding Crashers,” co-starring Owen Wilson, Isla Fisher, Bradley Cooper, and Rachel McAdams, and “The Watch.”
The comedies all had R-rated language, nudity and sex. In “Wedding Crashers,” Vaughn played a character who crashed weddings and lied to women about his identity in order to sleep with them.
Vaughn cited the board game Battleship as an example of IP that became a “vehicle for storytelling” for the sole reason that it had a recognizable name.
“The people in charge don’t want to get fired more, so than they’re looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate,” Vaughn said, referring to movie studio execs.
He added, “But as long as they follow them, they’re not going to lose their job because they can say, ’Well, look, I made a movie off the board game ‘Payday,’ so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t let me go, right?’”
Vaughn famously dated Jennifer Aniston in 2005 before starring in their 2006 movie “The Break Up.” Since 2010, he’s been married to realtor Kyla Weber, with whom he shares two kids.
His roles have been more sporadic after his critically panned starring role in Season 2 of HBO’s “True Detective” in 2015, alongside Rachel McAdams and Colin Farrell.
He also appeared in “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Vaughn said he doesn’t think the state of the industry is hopeless, however.
The 2023 Jennifer Lawrence comedy “No Hard Feelings” was R-rated, and so was the 2023 movie “Bottoms” starring Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, Marshawn Lynch and Nicholas Galitzine.
During a recent appearance on “Smartless” podcast hosted by Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett, Vaughn said, “The appetite from the audience for funny hard adult dangerous shocking comedy never went away.”
He added, “But, because the studios weren’t making them, Bill Burr, who’s great, started selling out Madison Square Garden, and Netflix started paying $20 million for those [comedy] specials instead of putting that money behind a story and a movie.”
“So it never really went away…but my sense is that it’s going to come back pouring in a big way.”
