Like any good public-service announcement, the UNICEF-esque commercial that arrived online 12 days ago (and began playing at multiplexes last week) aims to raise awareness about an extinction-level threat hiding in plain sight — namely, to comedy films. Fewer of which, a title card informs the viewer, came out last year than ever before. “Every passing year, more and more comedies go unmade, unseen, and unquoted,” Liam Neeson solemnly intones in the clip, as scenes from Anchorman, Clueless, 1993’s Coneheads, and Beverly Hills Cop play in the background. “But for the price of one movie ticket, you can help rescue the comedy. And in the process, you’ll get to share a smile, a laugh, and even the occasional groan.”
Then he farts.
Over the weekend, significant progress was made in efforts to save that endangered species with North American audiences buying $17 million worth of tickets to the Neeson-starring high-density hilarity, slapstick-goofball comedy The Naked Gun (with another $11.5 million coming in from overseas). Ranking third among new movies in wide release behind The Fantastic Four: First Steps and the animated animal-bank-robbers caper The Bad Guys 2, Naked Gun’s debut tally met prerelease “tracking” expectations and was generally regarded as a “good not great” opening among industry observers. But with its A- on the audience exit poll Cinemascore and 91 percent “Fresh” rating on the Tomatometer stoking late-summer word-of-mouth buzz — not to mention the movie’s pedigree as one of the only straight-down-the-pike, non-hybrid comedies to hit the inside of air-conditioned auditoriums in post-COVID times — The Naked Gun arrived as something of a cinematic unicorn.
“Back in the day, you couldn’t get guys like Jim Carrey and Eddie Murphy on TV; you found the big comedy stars and your comedy fix exclusively in theaters,” says Jeff Bock, senior box-office analyst at Exhibitor Relations. “But streaming is the home of comedy now. It’s the home of Adam Sandler now. And the comedy we have has morphed into something else. It’s in action films, superhero films, romantic films, and horror films. It’s not in just a regular quote-unquote ‘comedy’ like Naked Gun is.”
Leaving aside last summer’s world-beating ticket sales for the jokey, arterial-splatter superheroics of Deadpool & Wolverine, since 2015 a mere three comedies have opened to more than $20 million: 2015’s Melissa McCarthy star vehicle Spy ($29 million), 2016’s anthropomorphic hot-dog odyssey Sausage Party ($34.2 million), and 2017’s Essence Festival–set bacchanalia Girls Trip ($31.2 million). Fewer funny films are being green-lit by studios and those that are tend to generate less than half the box office that they used to. Earlier this year, the Sony Pictures’ Keke Palmer–SZA buddy comedy One of Them Days squeaked out a small profit, grossing $51 million on a $14 million budget (a sequel is reportedly in the works). And you’d have to go back to 2014 when 22 Jump Street took in $331.3 million worldwide (on a $50 million budget) and Let’s Be Cops grossed $138.2 million (on a $17 million budget) for an era when broad comedy was doing big business for Hollywood.
With its multicar collision of one-liners, sight gags, pratfalls, running jokes, bathroom humor, and surrealist absurdity, The Naked Gun is, in fact, a reboot — even if its original ’80s- and ’90s-era IP carries a low recognition factor with younger viewers. Long before Neeson would inherit the detective badge and a full clip of non sequiturs, Paramount announced Ed Helms would be taking on the Drebin role in 2013 with writers behind the Night at the Museum movies providing a script to revitalize the Naked Gun franchise. That project reportedly fell apart over creative differences between the filmmakers. In the new film, Neeson plays the stoic but blunder-prone Frank Drebin Jr., the grieving son of Leslie Nielsen’s deadpan, bumbling police-squad lieutenant Frank Drebin from the three cultishly popular original Gun films.
While Paramount executives weighed the risks of releasing a comedy in today’s fickle movie marketplace, the film’s “package” — not least its relatively economical $42 million budget — gave them the confidence to move forward. The rebooted Gun script was co-written by its director, Akiva Schaffer (Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers, the Spinal Tap–like Popstar: Never Stop Stopping), and produced by Seth MacFarlane (the comedy rainmaker behind Fox’s Family Guy and American Dad and the 2012 R-rated teddy-bear blockbuster Ted). MacFarlane and Schaffer’s choice to hire Neeson as Drebin, however, required a bit more persuasion. But the actor recorded a screen test showcasing himself being funny by being not funny in January 2024 that ultimately won over Paramount brass. “The only challenge we had was … explaining why you absolutely cannot have comedians,” MacFarlane explained on the entertainment-industry podcast The Town. “These have to be dramatic actors saying stupid stuff.”
Anecdotally at least, around Hollywood The Naked Gun seems to have united industry denizens (actors, directors, and writers but also agents, even rival studio execs) with would-be competitors all rooting for the comedy’s success in much the same way they rooted for Top Gun: Maverick to take off in the post-pandemic financial doldrums. As a kind of savior for a theatrical experience — a movie bigger than just itself.
There is also, of course, minimal competition for comedy audiences. While the role-reversal fantasy-comedy Freakier Friday arrives in theaters Friday, that Disney sequel is more specifically targeted toward a nostalgia-driven mother-daughter demographic while The Naked Gun skews more male but has also been appealing to viewers across age and gender divisions. As Paramount’s president of worldwide marketing and distribution, Marc Weinstock, sees it, Gun is off to a “very solid start” and will most likely continue to draw in audiences across the remainder of popcorn-movie season thanks to both its strong word of mouth and the relative paucity of tentpole-movie competition.
“People are suspicious of comedies,” Weinstock tells me. “They want to hear from their friends that it’s funny. They want ten people to say, ‘That movie’s hilarious!’ That’s where the genre is today. Now we have that, The Naked Gun going to play with relatively weaker competition through August. It’s set up to play for the rest of summer.”
Shawn Robbins, founder and owner of Box Office Theory and Fandango’s director of box-office analytics, commends Paramount’s financial discipline and promotional apparatus with creating the building blocks for a hit. “The ceiling for success on The Naked Gun is relatively low, especially compared to other summer movies,” he says. “It’s modestly budgeted. They managed it extremely well in terms of marketing and buzz and being able to elevate it to something that could stand out in theaters. Paramount could have something of a sleeper here.”
While straight-up comedies may have fallen out of favor as Hollywood’s hotness du jour, conventional industry wisdom holds that all it will take to reopen the comedy pipeline is a single big hit. Weinstock points out that comedy over-performers including The Hangover and Let’s Be Cops opened to decent-enough numbers but stuck around in theaters and kept putting butts in seats long enough to do “huge multiples.” (A multiple is the ratio of a film’s gross to its opening-weekend tally: the rawest studio measure of box-office success.) The executive feels Naked Gun could be that next big hit: “With comedy, you’re going to see that thing where people say, ‘All right, it’s safe to go back into the water.’ I think people are saying, ‘Okay, we can go back to the theater and watch comedies again.’”