Vince Vaughn believes Hollywood executives are too cautious these days when it comes to financing the kind of R-rated comedies that launched his career.
Vaughn — known for comedies like “Swingers,” “Old School” and “Wedding Crashers” — shared his thoughts on the decline of adult-oriented comedies during a recent appearance on “Hot Ones.”
“They overthink it,” Vaughn said. “And it’s crazy, where you have these rules, like, if you’re in geometry, and you say 87 degrees is a right angle, all your answers are going to be wrong, instead of 90 degrees. So there’s this idea or concept that comes up, like, they say something like, ‘You have to have IP.’”
Vaughn used the board game Battleship, which inspired a 2012 film of the same name, as an example of Hollywood turning intellectual property into a “storytelling vehicle” simply because it had a household name. Meanwhile, the “intellectual property” he saw early in his career were common life experiences, like turning 16 or skipping school.
“The people in charge don’t want to get fired any more than they want to do something great,” Vaughn said. “So they kind of want to follow a set of rules that are somehow defined, that aren’t really enforced. But as long as they follow them, they won’t lose their jobs because they can say, ‘Well, look, I made a movie out of the board game Payday, so even though the movie didn’t work out, you can’t let me go, can you?’”
But Vaughn hopes that movies similar to the R-rated comedies of the '90s and early 2000s will return to the big screen.
“People want to laugh, and they want to see things that seem dangerous or push the boundaries,” he said. “I think you’re going to see more of that in the movie business sooner rather than later, that’s what I predict.”
Watch the full interview on Hot Ones below.
