Let’s start with a lofty – but not necessarily inaccurate – statement: the future of comedy on film might well be decided within the next three weeks. Over that time, three comedy movies – each significant in their own way – will be released in the UK. The first, out Friday, is Friendship, an off-beat indie starring Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson, the creator of the cult sketch show I Think You Should Leave. The second, out on Netflix from 25 July, is Happy Gilmore 2, a sequel to Adam Sandler’s fondly remembered 1996 golfing comedy. And the third, out in cinemas on 1 August, is The Naked Gun, a reboot of the classic 1988 crime spoof, with Liam Neeson stepping into the Leslie Nielsen role.
When it comes to movie comedies, precarity doesn’t cover the half of it. Over the past decade, theatrically released studio comedies – once a mainstay of the film industry, and one of the most popular mass-market genres going – have been driven to the brink of extinction. Streaming is a huge factor in this, with the vast majority of comedy films now arriving straight on platforms such as Netflix. Films such as this year’s Will Ferrell-Reece Witherspoon comedy You’re Cordially Invited, Jesse Armstrong’s recent tech-bro satire Mountainhead, or Jerry Seinfeld’s dreary 2024 cereal spoof Unfrosted all had big stars, sizeable budgets, and, to varying extents, broad appeal. Fifteen years ago, it would have been inconceivable that they would skip a cinematic release and go straight to TV. Instead, they debuted on Prime Video, Sky and Netflix respectively.
Netflix has been particularly proactive in securing lucrative multi-film deals with some of the industry’s biggest comedy movie stars. This includes Sandler, whose production company, Happy Madison, put out a slew of hit comedies throughout the Noughties. Since signing a deal with Netflix a decade ago, Happy Madison has gone on to make over a dozen films, none of which were given meaningful theatrical releases. Happy Gilmore 2 might be the most high-profile of all Sandler’s Netflix outings – and is perhaps the most stinging reminder to date of the void left by Sandler’s abandonment of the multiplexes.
It’s not just Sandler, either. Since making his comeback in 2019 with the rollicking Netflix throwback Dolemite is My Name, Eddie Murphy, another gold-plated movie star, has stuck almost exclusively to streaming fare, whether that’s disposable Netflix comedies (You People; Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F) or equally forgettable ones for Prime Video (Candy Cane Lane; Coming 2 America). And then there’s Mike Myers, who has seemingly dropped off the map when it comes to big-screen comedies – but did develop his own (hugely disappointing) Netflix series, The Pentaverate.
Friendship, meanwhile, represents a different failing of the modern comedy ecosystem. That is to say, when great comedies are produced with the big-screen experience in mind, getting them in front of audiences is another matter entirely. Like Robinson’s TV work – I Think You Should Leave and the brilliant daffy sitcom Detroiters – Friendship is perhaps too odd and specific to ever be a big smash hit. But it’s one of the funniest, and most inventive, comedies in years, a spectacle of absurd social dysfunction that has been resoundingly well-received by audiences. It features famous stars – Rudd and Kate Mara both have major roles – and, in a summer that’s had an absolute dearth of quality film releases, deserved a proper go in cinemas. Instead, it’s premiering in the UK months after being released in the US, having already leaked online. Frustratingly few cinemas are even screening it.
The comedy standout of 2023, Bottoms – which saw Ayo Edebiri and Rachel Sennott play lesbian high-school students who set up a fight club – suffered a similar fate, trickling onto screens months after the fact. The funniest film of last year, meanwhile, was the almost entirely dialogue-free indie Hundreds of Beavers. Produced on a shoestring budget, the film enjoyed only a limited number of screenings in a small number of cinemas nationwide. (Though if you’ve not seen it, do yourself a favour and rent it digitally.) While there will always be quality comedies being produced independently, the studio system is needed for its powers of distribution just as much as production.
While traditional out-and-out comedies have been in decline for years, it’s not like cinema is completely devoid of laughs. In the world of so-called auteurist filmmaking, there is still plenty of scope for new spins on the comedy genre. Think Yorgos Lanthimos (Kinds of Kindness; Poor Things), Wes Anderson (The Phoenician Scheme; Asteroid City), Sean Baker (Anora; Red Rocket), Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness), or even Greta Gerwig (Barbie). Even Taika Waititi, directorial Marmite at the best of times, falls under this umbrella, with films such as Hunt for the Wilderpeople, or the admittedly dismal Next Goal Wins. But these films are not what we mean when we talk about conventional studio comedies – films that were sold on the simple premise of making people laugh.
It’s also worth noting just how the absence of actual comedy films has impacted other genres, namely, the ever-dominant action sphere. Thanks in part to the success of the breezy and unserious Marvel Cinematic Universe, action movies are now routinely written as sort of low-grade comedy vehicles; the quip reigns supreme. In the rare best cases, this can work very well: in 2023’s Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, or the works of Shane Black, such as The Nice Guys. Often, however, the results are excruciating: last year alone, films such as Red One and Argylle attempted to imbue their schlocky action material with a sort of smirking comic sensibility, to a disastrous end. It’s probably no coincidence that most of the best action blockbusters in recent years – Dune parts one and two, Avatar: The Way of Water, and the latter John Wick films – have eschewed the action-comedy vogue in favour of a straight-faced earnestness.
Which brings us to The Naked Gun. Directed by Akiva Schaffer, a member of Andy Samberg’s musical comedy trio The Lonely Island, the new reboot seems utterly atavistic at this point – even within the unfashionable world of film comedies, this subgenre, the spoof film, is especially unfashionable. Neeson is far from an obvious choice for broad comic fare (though the same would have been said of Nielsen, before his Airplane! career pivot). But, crucially, it looks, well, funny. And it’s getting the sort of release that has been too often denied for comedies in recent years: it’s coming out simultaneously in the UK and US, with a big marketing push beforehand.
If The Naked Gun is a hit, it could well be the evidence needed to convince studios to reinvest in comedies. It ought not to be a radical idea – that a comedy film is best enjoyed in a full auditorium, surrounded by people howling with shared laughter, as opposed to in the muffled privacy of your own living room. But it has become a radical idea, to the decision-makers in Hollywood. Comedy has been a staple of film for over a century now: whether it’s the 1920s silents, the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, the rowdy evolution of the 1970s and 1980s, or the rise of the modern style in the 1990s and 2000s, there have always been great comedies on screen. For the genre to go out the way it has been – well, that would be nothing short of tragedy.
‘Friendship’ is in cinemas from Friday 18 July
