Actress Melissa McCarthy has slammed claims that big-screen comedies no longer work, calling that a ‘false narrative’ and one that’s “absolute bulls—“.
As streaming has risen over the past fifteen years, cinemas have seen a shift in the kinds of movies that get made, with both middle-budget movies on the whole and mainstream comedies (especially romantic comedies) dwindling.
Doing one of her earliest interviews for the upcoming Netflix drama “The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey,” McCarthy got into a discussion with Variety about the issues with cinema comedy and part of it comes down to studios now being driven more by algorithms and accountants than artistic choices:
“When you take all of the artists out of it – they start to do the math of it, and that’s not comedy. They want a big premise. But most really great comedies, it’s about the people and the characters and the story, and it’s not like, ‘And they were both aliens at the end!’ But people really think they want that hook, and it’s just not real. Then they say comedies don’t work, and I’m like, ‘No, bad comedies don’t work.’ And I won’t take the fall for that.”
Referring back to her work with Jason Statham and Paul Feig on “Spy,” she says: “We should be on the ninth ‘Spy’! Everyone on ‘Spy’ was ready to re-rack immediately. There should be a new villain, new location.”
Asked why it didn’t happen, she said: “I don’t know. It did so well. People can say that doesn’t matter. I think it does.” She then goes on to explain that studios aren’t really that interested in modest hits any more:
“If I write something – or Ben and I write something – and it tanks, I’ll take the fall. Which we have not had to take. We don’t make $8 billion. We don’t make those kind of movies, but, I mean, $120 million, I’m not mad at that. The studio’s not mad at that. We want to make a reasonably priced thing that makes you a good profit. For some reason, that model is no longer desirable. I can’t figure out the math of it.”
McCarthy will shortly be seen in “The Murder of JonBenét Ramsey” which will premiere on the streaming service on December 10th.
