Weekend Box Office: Let The Overanalysis Of The Apatow Problem Begin

So the good news for Judd Apatow is that Funny People was the top movie in theaters this weekend. But the bad news is that it was a pretty light weekend of moviegoing, and that top spot only brought the movie about $23.4 million, which is being widely hailed as a disappointment.

It's a lot of money, but compared both to other Apatow-directed movies (specifically The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up) and to other Adam Sandler movies, it's a letdown. Of course, it's a more serious Apatow movie and a more serious Sandler movie than average, so drawing conclusions about what it means for future pure comedies from either one is a stretch. As Box Office Mojo notes, it's bad for a Sandler comedy, but good for a Sandler drama.

It's a wild overstatement to declare that this single weekend is "cold proof that Judd Apatow's hot streak is over", because — just as we discussed with regard to Will Ferrell after Land Of The Lost bombed — the magnitude of the streak is generally overstated to begin with.

Not every movie is Knocked Up, after the jump...

 

The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up were both big hits — both bigger than Funny People will probably turn out to be, the latter by a larger margin than the former. But there's never been a reliable "streak" of any length where everything the guy touched turned to Superbad. Superbad and Knocked Up, which both did extremely well, came out the same year as Walk Hard, which didn't.

If you look at the movies that make up the sort of meat-and-potatoes of what's become the Apatow brand, which includes all the movies he produces but doesn't direct, it has long included plenty of movies that didn't have enormous opening weekends. Funny People opened smaller than Superbad and Knocked Up, yes, but bigger than Forgetting Sarah Marshall and about the same as Pineapple Express.

It's true that his films had a bump in opening weekends around 2007, where he made a couple of huge hits, but Apatow has, for the most part, made and associated himself with a bunch of movies that have done roughly this well. Remember, back in the days of Freaks And Geeks and Undeclared, he had a reputation as a guy who couldn't find a wide audience even when he charmed critics. The idea that Judd Apatow has ever been a guy who made gigantic, $150 million earners with any reliability over any period of time is revisionist history.

Funny People is certainly a disappointment in the sense that it could have been a gigantic blockbuster in spite of its two-and-a-half-hour running time and unusual mix of comedy and drama. But the odds were never in favor of that happening, as they are rarely in favor of that happening with anything that doesn't involve superheroes, robots, or Harry Potter.

Apatow just signed on for three more films with Universal. They probably won't make $150 million, but they probably won't make $30 million, either. Somewhere between a blockbuster and The Love Guru — that's where Apatow usually lives and will probably remain.