Vaughn — known for comedy films such as “Swingers,” “Old School” and “Wedding Crashers” — shared his thoughts on the decline of raunchy R-rated comedies during a recent appearance on “Hot Ones.”
“They just overthink it,” Vaughn said. “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 the board game Battleship, which inspired the 2012 film of the same name, as an example of Hollywood turning an IP into a “vehicle for storytelling” simply because it has a recognizable name. Meanwhile, the “IP” he would see early in his career was shared life experiences, such as turning 16 or cutting school.
“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 said. “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 is hopeful that films similar to R-rated comedies from the ’90s and early 2000s will return to the big screen.
“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.”
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