Vince Vaughn on why Hollywood shuns his brand of R-rated comedies: “They just overthink it”

2 August, 2024

Vince Vaughn has offered his thoughts on why Hollywood no longer makes R-rated comedies like Wedding Crashers, Old School and Swingers.

During a recent appearance on Hot Ones podcast, in which celebrities are interviewed while eating hot wings that get increasingly spicier, the actor suggested that studio executives are now more inclined to play things safe and utilise existing intellectual property.
“They just overthink it,” Vaughn told host Sean Evans. “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 used the board game Battleship as an IP example, saying it became a “vehicle for storytelling” just because it had a recognisable 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 continued.
“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?’”
However, Vaughn said he expects things to change in the coming years. “People want to laugh, people want to look at stuff that feels a little bit like it’s, you know, dangerous or pushing the envelope,” he said. “I think you’re going to see more of it in the film space sooner than later, would be my guess.”
Vaughn stars in the upcoming movie Bad Monkey, based on Carl Hiaasen’s New York Times bestselling novel of the same name. It tells the story of Andrew Yancy (Vaughn), who has been suspended from the Miami Police Department and demoted to a restaurant health inspector.

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