Comedies Are Officially Dead. What's Wrong With 'Y2K'?
#300: "Y2K," "Yacht Rock," "Subservience," "Jingle All The Way," "Puss In Boots: The Last Wish"
Edition 300:
Hey movie lovers!
Our 300th Friday edition of the newsletter!! It would’ve been crazy to even consider that number when I started this thing in 2018. Thank you all so much for following me along this journey for some or all of that time.
This week: The sad state of theatrical comedies, a good documentary and bad Netflix B-movie that are new to streaming, then it’s further soul-searching on Christmas movies and blockbusters. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” a look at maybe the most exciting movie of 2025.
Y2K
There’s a new trend at the domestic box office that will probably continue for the next several years — one weekend where releases stack on top of each other (like Barbenheimer and Glicked) and then the following weekends where everybody else clears out of the way so they don’t have to compete. Even though we’re into early December, peak #MovieSZN, it was slim pickings for new movies at the box office.
But the release of Y2K gives me an excuse to pick at one of my favorite topics — the sad state of theatrical comedies. In February, I blamed Argylle for everything wrong with modern comedies. In March, Ricky Stanicky making the case for a comedy revival. But now at the end of the year I scroll through the 2024 releases I’ve watched and I notice that there are just very very few comedies overall. Especially pure comedies. Snack Shack? Everything else is folded in with action (The Instigators, The Fall Guy), superhero (Deadpool & Wolverine), romance (Players) or thriller (Anora).
Comedy isn’t dying at the box office. It’s dead.
On its face, a comedy directed by an SNL cast member (Kyle Mooney) starring an ascendant young movie star (Rachel Zegler) and other recognizable faces (Jaeden Martell from It and Julian Dennison from Hunt For The Wilderpeople) has all the pieces that would’ve made us super excited a decade or two ago.
I couldn’t help but think about Superbad while watching this movie, partially because Y2K curbs a lot of its plot from the 2007 coming-of-age classic. Two loser best friends go to a party and one of them tries to get the girl of his dreams, but the real love story is between the bros (come to think of it, that’s the plot of all of these).
Every generation has had its Superbad, from the John Hughes movies in the 80s up through Adam Sandler and Will Ferrell, monocultural comedy touchstones. Until now. Where have the funny movies gone?
It’s pretty easy to blame TikTok, YouTube and the constant barrage of humorous skits and memes that young people are exposed to all day every day. Ask a young person who they’re turning to for consistent funny content, they could probably name five different people, but none of them are on the silver screen.
As a result, movies have aged up. Ferrell, for instance, is still starring in these movies — the trailer for You’re Cordially Invited with Reese Witherspoon came out this week and I don’t want to judge a book by its cover but…woof. It’s chicken or the egg, I suppose. Do you put more young people in movies to try to attract a different audience or play to the aging base?
Y2K maybe answers that, turning out a $2 million opening weekend against a $15 million budget.
A24 tried to spice up the comedy with a horror plotline (horror, supposedly the box office antidote!). The aforementioned party happens on New Years Eve 1999, and about halfway through, the Y2K phenomenon turns out to be real and the computers go on a bloody rampage. It’s gory but not trying to be scary, and the brutal kills are played for laughs.
I don’t think we can simply dismiss this movie for being bad. “Oh, the comedies of MY youth were just funnier,” says every generation. Anyone who has ever seen Mooney’s original sketches before SNL knows he’s a funny guy. And this movie does have some very funny moments (especially Mooney’s appearances on screen).
Why then does it not work? Maybe there’s just too many different things trying to be accomplished in the trim 1hr31min run time (in the Superbad days, it was enough to just be funny with maybe a little dash of romance or action mixed in).
Maybe it’s just weird that a movie that relies so heavily on 2000-specific nostalgia is fronted by primary cast members who were all born after 2000? Or maybe the nostalgia cycle hasn’t made its way through the 1990s yet to reach 2000. Seriously, who is out there stumping for Limp Bizkit (whose lead singer Fred Durst plays a pretty pivotal role in this movie)?
There just feels like something structurally broken about this movie and/or the system that produced it. And we need to fix it. Because I refuse to believe that movies should just concede comedy all together to 15-second online videos of people shouting “Suspect Has…” insults at each other.
Something New
Yacht Rock: A Dockumentary (Max): This is not documentary pretending to be cinema, it’s closer to documentary as journalism, chronicling the strange modern reevaluation of the music phenomenon of the 1970s and 80s now known as “yacht rock.” It’s one of those you know it when you hear it type of things, and this documentary not only sets out to tell you all the behind-the-scenes backstories behind songs like “What A Fool Believes” or bands like Doobie Brothers, Kenny Loggins, Steely Dan and Toto, but also tell viewers about the handful of session musicians who ended up playing on basically every popular album of the decade.
It’s interesting as a cultural artifact and a helluva good time to kick back, relax and listen to some great soft rock classics. Really enjoyed this doc and think it makes for easy watching for you this holiday break.
Subservience (Netflix): If you’re Netflix, it makes all the sense in the world to spend your money on B-movies like this one, or those cheesy Christmas rom-coms, or trashy horror exploitation, because they’re genre movies that are cheap to make and easy to click on as a tile on the home screen, shooting them into the Top 10 and siphoning off just as much precious engagement time as a much more expensive project.
Unfortunately, the one who suffers is the viewer, who probably got lured in by that cover photo that captures the entire appeal of the premise — sexy evil AI robot Megan Fox — and then ended up watching a movie that ChatGPT easily could’ve cooked up. Fox playing a robot might actually help her performance, which has never been particularly lively, but it can’t save the humans in this movie from displaying some really bad acting.
It’s the kind of crazy ex-girlfriend plotline that has been done a million times, especially during the erotic thriller peak of the 1990s, but whereas those movies felt a little dangerous and unmoored from the safety of…I don’t know, standards of decency?…this thing is so staid and predictable. The opportunity to say something interesting about our increasing reliance on artificial intelligence is ignored in favor of boiler plate “hot girl gone crazy” formulation. Is anyone going to mention this movie has the same plot as M3GAN? Just me? Okay. Well it does, and somehow it’s even worse.
Something Old
Jingle All The Way (1996, Hulu, Disney+, Amazon Prime): My mission in watching this movie was to determine whether the trashy Christmas movies of decades past are really that much better than the Hallmark/Netflix B-movies of today. After all, this movie had a $60 million budget (gigantic for back then!) and stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sinbad, Phil Hartman and Jim Belushi in it!
The most honest answer is…not by much. This movie has a level of professionalism and quality today’s don’t, so its shortcomings come off more cheesy than outright incompetent. It’s still got one of those classic Christmas movie premises: A workaholic executive (Arnold) has to find the hottest toy of the season to win back the affection of his son, and goes through a series of misadventures to get it. And in retrospect, this movie gets credit for introducing us to the cue cards trope (made famous in Love Actually) and child actor Jake Lloyd (made uber-famous in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace).
The biggest differentiator is that movies like this have some rewatch value. Even though it’s not good, I could see families throwing it on every year around the holidays. Meanwhile, they have to keep churning out new Hallmark/Netflix movies because I highly doubt people are going back and giving the Lindsay Lohan joint from a few years ago a second chance.
Something To Stream
Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (Amazon): A friend of mine whose movie opinions I really respect (this is a guy who logs religiously on Letterboxd and regularly watching black-and-white classics, he’s legit), told me a while back that this was one of his favorite movies of all time. Wait a second…the THIRD movie in a trilogy of SPIN-OFFS from the Shrek FRANCHISE? On its face, that’s screaming BCE. But given my recent blockbuster panic, I was searching for big crowd-pleasing entertainment (this thing grossed almost $500 million) that was actually good.
And I was not disappointed! I’d put this movie right up there with the Pixar classics as something that’s definitely for kids but with substance for adults to enjoy too. Its animation is excellent, and its visuals take advantage of the creative freedom offered by the medium to produce some really wild sequences. The characters are nuanced and layered and have real problems and flaws they need to address, and the voice acting is top notch: Antonio Banderas, Salma Hayek, Florence Pugh, Olivia Coleman, Ray Winstone, John Mulaney, Da'Vine Joy Randolph.
It was an affirming experience for me. Hollywood is capable of doing this right! Big movies that are legit good! Never thought I’d say the example to aspire to would be Puss In Boots 3 but here we are.
Trailer Watch: 28 Years Later
Give me a second to explain why this trailer is so incredibly exciting. In 2002, director Danny Boyle (Steve Jobs, 127 Hours, Slumdog Millionaire) and screenwriter Alex Garland (who went on to direct Ex Machina, Annihilation and Civil War) teamed up to make a little zombie/post-apocolyptic thriller starring Cilian Murphy called 28 Days Later. Five years later, a sequel 28 Weeks Later came out without Boyle, Garland or Murphy, but on the whole, both movies are somewhere between liked and revered by the cinephile community.
Adding an extra wrinkle of intrigue, neither of those movies have been made available digitally by Sony, so I and many others have never seen them. That makes them almost like this mythical thing, recreating an experience that was all too common in the pre-streaming days.
Then boom, Boyle and Garland are back to complete the trilogy with an awesome cast — Aaron Taylor Johnson, Ralph Fiennes, Jodie Comer, Cilian Murphy, Jack O'Connell — and truly one of the coolest trailers I’ve seen in a long time. This anticipation and promise of discovery (x3!) is what being a movie fan is all about!