On paper, doing a legacy sequel to The Naked Gun sounds like a terrible idea and absolutely scraping the bottom of the IP barrel. In execution, director and Lonely Island veteran Akiva Schaffer demonstrates remarkable chops in making a hilarious standalone exercise that still lives up to the Naked Gun legacy. Liam Neeson and Pamela Anderson are an absolute riot in the lead roles. Plus, like fellow 2020 comedy classics Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar, Bottoms, Barbie, Friendship, and especially Hundreds of Beavers, The Naked Gun reaffirms how important sharp visual sensibilities are to making great comedy cinema.
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There was only one downside to watching The Naked Gun in a theater. It was a reminder that I hadn’t experienced the phenomenon of laughing in a theater full of strangers in the 2020s nearly as often as I should. Let Frank Drebin Jr.’s big adventure be a wake-up call to Hollywood: we need more comedy movies in theaters.
Where Did The Theatrical Comedy Movie Go?
The theatrical comedy saw a bit of a decline in the late 2010s as former big-screen stars like Adam Sandler signed lucrative deals with streaming services. Still, as late as 2019, comedies like Jumanji: The Next Level, The Upside, A Madea Family Funeral, Good Boys, and Hustlers were still making big bucks at the box office. The biggest culprit, unfortunately, is COVID-19.
Once upon a time, 2020 was actually set to feature a pretty stacked slate of big-screen comedies: The King of Staten Island, Coming 2 America, Bill & Ted Face The Music, Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar, The Man From Toronto, and many others were all set for theatrical bows. Once theaters shut down, though, studios saw an opportunity to jump onto the supposedly “unbeatable” streaming bandwagon. Costly blockbusters like Top Gun: Maverick, Black Widow, and Ghostbusters: Afterlife were shelved indefinitely; comedies like Coming 2 America, My Spy, and The Lovebirds, meanwhile, were seen as “expendable” and were either sold to streamers or released on premium-video-on-demand.
Audiences didn’t abandon theatrical comedies even with some late 2010s box office challenges for the genre. After all, Girls’ Trip became a box office sensation happened as late as 2017. The problem here lies in what production studios have determined are “worthy” of theatrical releases. Dumping these comedies to streamers in 2020 started a trend that the major streamers and studios haven’t abandoned. Fire Island and Summer of ’69, for instance, got dumped to Hulu courtesy of Disney despite both scoring glowing reviews. Peacock, meanwhile, housed the Universal title Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain.
The biggest studios have offered few chances for theatrical comedies to prove their mettle at the box office. That means a generation of moviegoers hasn’t had the chance to carve out the kind of cinematic memories only comedies can inspire.
We Need More Silly Comedies In Theaters!
One of my favorite moviegoing memories is going to see This is the End in theaters at a sold-out press screening back in June 2013. This was at a point in my life where seeing R-rated movies on the big screen still had novelty and danger to it. That certainly informed some of my fondness for this screening, but what really made it memorable was how the audience was just cackling throughout the entire runtime. For 90-ish minutes, a bunch of strangers from all over Texas were suddenly united in appreciating Danny McBride’s comic timing. We all entered that auditorium, distant souls; we left bonded over hysterical cinema.
That’s the power of communal moviegoing experiences: they intertwine with our neighbors and remind us that we all have more in common than we don’t. Watching Hundreds of Beavers in early 2024, meanwhile, with the other moviegoers who took a chance on this unknown indie was similarly special. We were all losing our minds over this tiny slice of retro-comedic filmmaking that we didn’t know could even exist in the modern world. Plus, I was in a terrible mental state on that fateful day I saw Beavers. Watching live-action Looney Tunes hijinks and people in animal costumes getting brutalized gave me a ray of light when I needed it most.
That’s an accomplishment few other genres can easily accomplish. Everyone has fun and unforgettable memories of experiencing comedy features with other people. You don’t carve out those memories watching new comedy films on Hulu by yourself on a Tuesday afternoon. You need to see it in a jam-packed house where everyone’s attention is fully on the gigantic wacky images. Plus, the theatrical experience just gives comedy films even more of an incentive to actually look and play like movies.
Original movies for Netflix and streamers (comedy or otherwise) tend to have very stilted, expository dialogue and unimaginative visuals rooted in how these films are valued as phone viewing or background noise. With a theatrical release, your phone is away, and all the attention is on the big screen. You have to look as polished and precise in your silliness as The Naked Gun did, offering an actual action movie/detective Noir aesthetic to break away from with its zany comedic asides. It had to look and feel like cinema to skewer it properly, and that’s a feat comedy film built for streaming just can’t equal.
There’s really no end to the benefits of comedy movies playing on the big screen, a phenomenon that needs to become a weekly occurrence at everyone’s local multiplexes. Hopefully, Naked Gun and further 2025 comedies like Good Fortune, Freakier Friday, and Anaconda get the ball rolling on a theatrical comedy resurgence. We all need that as much as Frank Drebin Jr. does not need to consume another loaded chili dog.
The Naked Gun is now playing in theaters.
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Image Credit: Marvel Comics
