Vince Vaughn He believes Hollywood executives today are too cautious when it comes to financing the kind of adult comedies that launched his career.
Vaughn, known for comedy films such as “Swingers,” “Old School” and “Wedding Crashers,” shared his thoughts on the decline of edgy, R-rated comedies during a recent appearance on “The hot ones.”
“They just overthink,” Vaughn said. “And it’s crazy, they give you these rules, like if you do geometry and say 87 degrees is a right angle, then all your answers are wrong, instead of 90 degrees. Then an idea or concept came up, they were 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 how Hollywood turns an intellectual property into a “vehicle for storytelling” simply because it has a recognizable name. Meanwhile, the “intellectual property” he would look at early in his career were shared life experiences, like turning 16 or skipping school.
“The people in charge don’t want to get fired, they want to do something great, so they want to follow a set of rules that are kind of set in stone and unenforceable,” Vaughn said. “But as long as they follow those rules, they’re not going to lose their jobs because they can say, ‘Well, look, I made a movie based on the board game Payday, so even though the movie didn’t work, you can’t fire me, right? ’”
But Vaughn is hopeful that films similar to the R-rated comedies of the ’90s and early 2000s will return to the big screen.
“People want to laugh, they want to see things that seem a little bit dangerous or push the boundaries,” he said. “I think we’ll see more of that in cinema soon, that’s what I think.”
Watch the full interview on “Hot Ones” below.