Not So Funny Men
By Dorothy Pomerantz 11.12.07, 6:08 PM ET

LOS ANGELES -
In a holiday season with few blockbusters, Fred Claus seemed a sure bet for Warner Bros., Vince Vaughn stars as Santa's no-good older brother who comes to the North Pole to learn a little something about family. In the wake of his back-to-back hits, Wedding Crashers and The Break-Up, Vaughn was paid a reported $20 million for the role.

But as the film opened over the weekend, studio executives faced a Grinchy third-place finish in the box office derby, raking in just $19.2 million, not even enough to cover Vaughn's salary. Reviews were tepid, and parents opted to take their children to Jerry Seinfeld's week-old Bee Movie rather than watching Vaughn party with the elves. Warner Bros. points out that several other recent holiday films, including Elf and The Polar Express, opened poorly but went on to become big money makers. But there's no denying it's been a bad year for big-budget comedies. Evan Almighty, staring Steve Carell as a modern-day Noah, was supposed to be a high-grossing follow-up to megahit Bruce Almighty. Instead, the $175 million film has earned only $172 million worldwide, according to Box Office Mojo. Throw in the $25 million cost of marketing a movie like this, and it remains well in the red. The $40 million film The Heartbreak Kid, for which Ben Stiller earned a reported $15 million, has grossed a paltry $77 million so far this year.

At the same time, bargain-basement comedies with no name stars pulled in big bucks. Superbad, a $20 million film about two high school boys trying to get booze for a party, earned $162 million. Knocked Up, about a lovable loser who impregnates a woman way out of his league, cost $30 million and earned $216 million.

What those two films have in common is Judd Apatow. Since directing and writing The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005, he has become a studio darling, putting out cheap, funny films that earn five to seven times their budgets. Over the next two years, he is producing or writing six films for Columbia Pictures, Paramount and Universal.

An added pain for studios is that comedies, even ones that do relatively well domestically, are hard to market overseas. Funny doesn't always translate. Wild Hogs, the highest-grossing comedy of the year, with $253 million in worldwide box office revenues, earned 34% of its gross overseas. By contrast, the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie earned 68% of its $961 million in worldwide box office revenues overseas.

So will studios continue to pay big names big bucks for movies that don't add to the bottom line?
"You'll definitely see them rethinking," says Chad Hartigan, a box office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "Any time the studios see something like Apatow's movies making money and something else not making money, they're going to rethink."

There are already signs that things are changing. Jim Carrey, who regularly earns upwards of $15 million per comedy, has reportedly agreed to take no money upfront for his next film, Yes Man, instead opting for a 36% cut of whatever the film earns after it breaks even. The move could be seen as an extreme sign of Carrey's faith that the movie will actually make money, or a shrewd move by the studios to get the struggling actor for nothing. And Adam Sandler, whose I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry earned a respectable $183 million, has jumped on the Apatow bandwagon. He'll star in the director's 2008 film, You Don't Mess With the Zohan, about a Mossad agent who fakes his death to become a New York City hairdresser.

Read more from Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/2007/11/12/hollywood-comedies-vaughn-biz-media-cz_dp_1112funnymen.html?partner=weekly_newsletter

Moved to TV/Movies. What's your opinion of what you posted, sir?

how many times do i tell people that i dont read long posts