“It went as bad as you would imagine, for all the reasons you would imagine, and now we know it’s not for
us,” he told Vulture last year. “So many people’s careers get sucked into these giant movie franchises, but
we’ve learned that it’s a fucking nightmare when you’re making a studio’s most expensive movie. The
studio involvement on a project of that size is just not worth the trouble. It’s a lot better to be making the
studio’s least expensive movie.”
It is hard to find failures on such a grand scale in the years since. Rogen’s Kim Jong-Un comedy The
Interview was an inexplicably infamous movie that few actually saw, embroiled as it was in the 2014 Sony
hack (A North Korea-affiliated hacker group claimed that they hacked thousands of emails from Sony
employees and would bomb cinemas showing the film in retaliation for its existence), but otherwise he has
been smart with his choices. The frat house comedy Bad Neighbours, X-rated animated film Sausage Party
and the celebrity-apocalypse movie This Is the End earned rave reviews and enormous amounts of money,
confirming that Rogen still recognises what we find funny.
He and Goldberg have also been busy building a television empire, producing series including Black
Monday, Preacher, Future Man and the dark superhero comedy The Boys. Their impressive TV hit ratio is
another remarkable achievement, but also not as important as the success of Good Boys – in a crowded
television landscape, it’s not especially difficult for very famous super-producers to turn comic book
adaptations and weirdo comedy series into cult hits.
That Good Boys has been a surprise smash, already earning back its $20m budget in a single weekend, helps
confirm that the mainstream comedy film isn’t dead – and, if anything, that Seth Rogen is its new king.
‘Good Boys’ is in cinemas now