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# Why Don’t They Make Comedies Like Superbad and The Hangover Anymore?
- URL: https://theseguysknow.io/why-hollywood-stopped-making-comedies/
- Published: 2026-09-23T05:52:12.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-23T08:45:21.000Z
- Description: Superbad, The Hangover, Project X and Tropic Thunder came from a Hollywood that was much more willing to bet on original comedy. We looked at what changed.
- Author: Anas Amenziz
- Tags: Things to Watch, Movies

From *Superbad* in 2007 to *This Is the End* in 2013, mainstream comedy was a normal part of the theatrical calendar. *The Hangover, Step Brothers, Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, Project X* and *21 Jump Street* all arrived within that period, alongside plenty of films nobody remembers nearly as fondly. Studios made enough comedies that one film did not have to carry an argument for the future of the entire genre.

Several of them are already in our [best raunchy comedies to watch with friends](https://theseguysknow.io/best-raunchy-comedies-to-watch-with-friends/). Looking back at that list now, the strange part is how ordinary those releases once were. A studio could spend $15–35 million on an original comedy, put it into cinemas and see what happened.

Hollywood still produces plenty of funny television and films, but the straightforward studio comedy with a serious theatrical release behind it has become much less common. The usual explanation is that audiences became easier to offend and studios became afraid of making another *Tropic Thunder* or *Superbad*. Culture has certainly changed, and some material from that period would be written differently now, but Hollywood was already cutting comedy budgets while those arguments were still years away.

In 2011, the *Los Angeles Times* [reported that average DVD revenue for comedies had fallen 63% between 2006 and 2010](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-jul-05-la-fi-ct-comedy-20110705-story.html?ref=theseguysknow.io), compared with a 39% decline across the movie business overall. Judd Apatow was already telling the paper that comedy had relied heavily on DVD purchases and that losing that revenue was putting pressure on budgets. At the same time, studios were relying more heavily on international box office, where dialogue, cultural references and specifically American social situations were harder to sell than action or spectacle.

## Quick Answer

**The studio comedy of the 2000s had a useful financial structure. Production costs were usually manageable, successful films could earn several times their budget in cinemas, and DVDs and Blu-rays created another large source of revenue after the theatrical run.**

[*Superbad* cost about $17.5 million, made roughly $170 million worldwide and later generated an estimated $141 million in US physical-media sales](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Superbad?ref=theseguysknow.io). *The Hangover* cost $35 million, reached about $465.5 million worldwide and added an estimated $243.6 million in domestic DVD and Blu-ray sales. [*Project X* was made for $12 million and earned about $103 million worldwide](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Project-X-%282011%29?ref=theseguysknow.io), followed by roughly $23 million in estimated US disc sales.

DVD revenue then fell sharply, overseas box office carried more weight, and studios gradually moved away from developing original films internally before a cast and director were attached. Seth Rogen has said that Sony committed to making *Superbad* before its eventual cast existed. The studio bought the script, established a budget and release plan, and then the filmmakers found the actors. In 2026, he [said a major studio would be extremely unlikely to make the same commitment today](https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/seth-rogen-superbad-never-get-made-video/?ref=theseguysknow.io).

## Why Studios Kept Making Them

| Film           | Production budget | Worldwide box office | Estimated US disc sales |
| -------------- | ----------------- | -------------------- | ----------------------- |
| *Superbad*     | $17.5m            | $170.0m              | $141.0m                 |
| *The Hangover* | $35.0m            | $465.5m              | $243.6m                 |
| *Project X*    | $12.0m            | $103.0m              | $23.3m                  |

Box-office gross is not studio profit. Cinemas keep part of ticket revenue, marketing and distribution add costs, and a production budget does not represent everything spent on a release. Even allowing for that, the scale of the returns made comedy an attractive category. Warner Bros. spent around $12 million on *Project X* and the film took more than $100 million worldwide. *Superbad* made almost ten times its production budget theatrically. [*The Hangover* reached $465.5 million worldwide from a $35 million production budget](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hangover-The-%282009%29?ref=theseguysknow.io).

After cinemas, the same films could generate another large round of revenue at home. *Superbad's* estimated US DVD and Blu-ray sales came within roughly $29 million of its entire worldwide box office. *The Hangover* generated almost another quarter of a billion dollars from domestic physical media. A film did not have to recover every dollar during its theatrical window.

By 2011, that second revenue cycle was shrinking quickly. The *Los Angeles Times* report cited IHS Screen Digest figures showing a 63% decline in average DVD revenue for comedy over four years. Apatow told the paper that comedies had benefited particularly heavily from people buying discs, so studios reacted by reducing what they were willing to spend.

Overseas revenue was becoming more valuable during the same period. A car chase or fantasy battle travels with relatively little explanation, while a comedy may depend on word choice, timing, local references and a particular social environment. *The Hangover* still made roughly $188 million outside North America, but films such as that were competing for studio money with genres that offered more predictable international appeal.

## How Superbad Got Made

Sony bought *Superbad*, committed roughly $20 million and planned its release before the final cast had been assembled. Jonah Hill had not yet proved himself as a theatrical lead. Emma Stone was making her feature-film debut. Christopher Mintz-Plasse had never acted professionally.

The script had already convinced the studio to make the film. Casting could therefore be about finding the right people for the material rather than finding names that would persuade someone to finance the material in the first place.

Rogen [described a different development system to *Variety* in 2025](https://au.variety.com/2025/tv/features/seth-rogen-slams-hollywood-the-studio-sony-hack-21211/?ref=theseguysknow.io). Fewer projects are developed from the ground up inside studios, while producers and agencies increasingly assemble a script, director and cast before taking the package out to buyers. He said that if *Superbad* were going through that system, he and Evan Goldberg would probably need to attach essentially the whole cast before somebody bought it.

Recognisable actors and established directors make financing and marketing easier, but comedy casting is unusually dependent on chemistry and on finding performers who may not look commercially obvious beforehand. Christopher Mintz-Plasse could be discovered during the production process because Sony had already decided that the film itself was worth making.

## Comedy Moved Somewhere Else

Writers and performers who might once have spent more of their careers making mid-budget theatrical comedies now have television, streaming and genre films competing for the same talent. Action films use more comedy than they once did, superhero films built entire house styles around sarcastic dialogue, and horror regularly mixes tension with humor.

*Superbad* had very little to fall back on if the comedy failed. There was no action story, franchise mythology or second genre carrying the film. *Project X* had an equally simple proposition: a teenage party gets increasingly out of control. Both films had to hold an audience with the characters, situations and comedy because there was not much else being sold.

A successful comedy also remained visible for much longer. It opened in cinemas, spread through word of mouth, came out on DVD and kept appearing on television. The same characters and scenes could remain in circulation for years. Someone who missed *Superbad* in cinemas could encounter it at a friend's house six months later or on television two years after that.

Streaming shortened that cycle while greatly expanding the amount of material available. A new comedy can reach millions of homes immediately and then lose its position on the homepage when the next batch of releases arrives. TikTok, Reels, YouTube, podcasts and stand-up clips compete for the same casual entertainment time without asking someone to commit to a feature film.

We looked at the same kind of attention cycle in our piece on [how to stop doomscrolling](https://theseguysknow.io/how-to-stop-doomscrolling/). Infinite feeds continuously replace one piece of entertainment with another. Comedy fits particularly easily into that format because a funny clip can work in thirty seconds without requiring any knowledge of what came before it.

*Superbad, The Hangover* and *Project X* benefited from years of repeated exposure. Their theatrical audiences, DVD owners, television viewers and people discovering them through friends kept overlapping. A streaming film can have a huge first week without building the same shared familiarity over time.

## Was It Really Political Correctness?

Social media changed the risk around individual jokes. A scene can circulate separately from the film, reach millions of people, and become a public argument before much of that audience has watched the original work. Studios know that material treated casually in 2007 may attract very different attention now.

We saw that Judd Apatow [rejected political correctness as the main explanation for the decline of R-rated theatrical comedy](https://au.variety.com/2025/film/global/judd-apatow-defends-r-rated-comedies-box-office-20446/?ref=theseguysknow.io) when he spoke to *Variety* in 2025\. His view was that a sufficiently successful comedy would make studios interested in the category again. Rogen's comments about *Superbad* have also concentrated on development, financing and risk rather than suggesting that Sony would reject the film because its jokes were unacceptable.

DVD revenue for comedy had already fallen sharply by 2010\. Studios were cutting budgets and worrying about how American humor performed overseas while Facebook was still the dominant social network and TikTok did not exist. The economics were moving away from this kind of film before today's arguments about offensive comedy became part of the explanation.

Changing standards still affect which jokes get written, which actors want to perform them and how studios market a film. They just sit inside a much larger change in how those films are financed and distributed.

## Comedy Can Still Make Money

*Anyone But You* was made for a reported $25 million and opened domestically with only about $6 million. Instead of disappearing after its first weekend, it kept selling tickets until [the worldwide total reached almost $220 million](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Anyone-But-You-%282023%29?ref=theseguysknow.io). Its theatrical run looked much closer to the older pattern of word of mouth building over time than the front-loaded performance expected from many modern studio films.

*One of Them Days*, the R-rated buddy comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA, cost roughly $14 million and made about [$51.4 million worldwide](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/One-of-Them-Days-%282025%29?ref=theseguysknow.io), including more than $50 million in North America. Its numbers are far smaller than *The Hangover*, but a $14 million original comedy never needed half a billion dollars to make sense.

The 2025 version of *The Naked Gun* reached about [$102 million worldwide on a reported $42 million production budget](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Naked-Gun-The-%282025%29?ref=theseguysknow.io). An established title gives it an advantage over an original film, but audiences were still being asked to buy a cinema ticket primarily because they expected the film to be funny.

Apatow believes one unusually large comedy hit could quickly change studio behavior. Hollywood has followed profitable genres before, and there is no reason comedy would be treated differently if another film produced *Hangover*\-level returns. Studios first have to release enough comedies for an unexpected hit to have a chance of appearing.

## Hollywood Stopped Taking the Same Chances

Studios in the 2000s were not unusually generous toward comedy; they released plenty of weak films because the category made enough money to justify repeated attempts. One comedy could fail without forcing every studio to reconsider whether audiences still wanted to laugh in cinemas.

*Superbad* did not have to demonstrate that R-rated comedy remained commercially viable. Sony had already decided it was willing to spend roughly $20 million on the script, and the filmmakers could then find Jonah Hill, Michael Cera, Emma Stone and Christopher Mintz-Plasse without each casting decision having to justify the original investment.

A project assembled today may be expected to answer more commercial questions before a studio commits: Who is starring? Who is directing? Does the title already mean something to audiences? Will it travel internationally? How much can the marketing department rely on existing awareness?

An original comedy can answer those questions, but films built around established properties or proven stars often answer them earlier. A development system that reduces uncertainty before the money is committed will naturally make fewer bets on scripts whose value may depend on casting discoveries, chemistry and a director finding the right tone during production.

## Final Verdict

*Superbad, The Hangover* and *Project X* were not especially expensive films by Hollywood standards, and when one of them worked it could make several times its budget in cinemas before earning more money again on DVD and Blu-ray. That gave studios a good reason to keep making original comedies even when some of them inevitably failed.

Once physical-media sales collapsed, a big part of that business disappeared. Studios were also becoming more dependent on international box office, where action films, franchises and familiar characters are generally easier to sell than a very American comedy built around dialogue, timing and cultural references, so original comedy started looking like a less comfortable bet than it had ten or fifteen years earlier.

The way these films get made changed at the same time. Sony backed *Superbad* before Jonah Hill was a proven movie star, before Emma Stone had appeared in a feature film and before anyone knew who Christopher Mintz-Plasse was. The studio liked the script enough to commit to the film and find the right cast afterwards, whereas today projects are much more likely to arrive with major actors, a director and other commercial pieces already attached before a studio is willing to put money behind them.

Culture obviously changed too, and some jokes from the 2000s would be written differently now, but that does not explain the whole decline. Hollywood was already talking about falling DVD revenue and the difficulty of selling American comedy overseas in 2011, long before the current arguments about whether films like *Superbad* or *Tropic Thunder* could still be made.

Recent comedies have shown that people will still go to see them when the film is good and the budget makes sense. The bigger difference is that Hollywood simply makes fewer original comedies now, which also means fewer chances for one of them to become unexpectedly huge. In the 2000s, studios could release several in the same year, let some disappear, make decent money on others and occasionally end up with something like *Superbad* or *The Hangover*.

Nobody at Sony could have known exactly what *Superbad* would become when they decided to make it, but the system gave them enough reason to take the chance in the first place.

#### Sources

- [Seth Rogen on how **Superbad* was financed and why the same process is unlikely today — TheWrap](https://www.thewrap.com/creative-content/movies/seth-rogen-superbad-never-get-made-video/?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [Seth Rogen on studio development and packaged projects — Variety](https://au.variety.com/2025/tv/features/seth-rogen-slams-hollywood-the-studio-sony-hack-21211/?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [Judd Apatow on R-rated theatrical comedy and its decline — Variety](https://au.variety.com/2025/film/global/judd-apatow-defends-r-rated-comedies-box-office-20446/?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [Comedy, declining DVD revenue and overseas box office — Los Angeles Times](https://www.latimes.com/business/la-xpm-2011-jul-05-la-fi-ct-comedy-20110705-story.html?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**Superbad* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Superbad?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**The Hangover* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Hangover-The-%282009%29?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**Project X* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Project-X-%282011%29?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**Anyone But You* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Anyone-But-You-%282023%29?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**One of Them Days* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/One-of-Them-Days-%282025%29?ref=theseguysknow.io)
- [**The Naked Gun* financial data — The Numbers](https://www.the-numbers.com/movie/Naked-Gun-The-%282025%29?ref=theseguysknow.io)