Vince Vaughn shared his thoughts on why Hollywood has steered clear of the type of R-rated comedies that helped the actor make his name.
“They just overthink it,” Vaughn told Hot Ones at around the 11:10 minute mark. “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 Battleship as an example, the board game which became the basis of the 2012 film of the same name. He said Battleship is a prime example of Hollywood flipping IP—or intellectual property—into a “vehicle for storytelling” because it was a household 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 told host Sean Evans. “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?’”
But Vaughn thinks Hollywood will return to the R-rated comedy of the 90s and early 2000s—and soon.
“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.”
The 54-year-old made his mark in the movie industry with comedies like Dodgeball, Swingers, Old School, and Wedding Crashers. His new dark comedy series, Apple Original’s Bad Monkey, will be available to stream on Aug. 14.
Matt Damon expressed similar sentiments on Hot Ones in 2021 when he explained why mid-size movies aren't made anymore due to the DVD becoming "obsolete."
“So what happened was the DVD was a huge part of our business, of our revenue stream,” Damon said. “Technology has just made that obsolete, and so the movies that we used to make you could afford to not make all of your money when it played in the theatre because you knew you had the DVD coming behind the release.”