"Friendship" Is The Funniest Movie Of The Year...If You're In On The Joke
#320: "Friendship"
Edition 320:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: What the new Tim Robinson comedy “Friendship” says about our relationship to fandom in 2025. Apologies on having no streaming recs this week, I am travelling and also when my main write-up tends to go long I don’t want to flirt with the email length limits. Hope you enjoy the longer essay! In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Austin Butler is climbing the movie star power rankings.
Friendship
There’s little question in 2025 that movies have relinquished their place at the center of popular culture, replaced by the internet and social media. Still, the halo effect of the silver screen still carries a unique prestige. Millions more people may watch a YouTube creator every day, for instance, but he or she is not a movie star.
So when Tim Robinson—nominally the creator and star of the Netflix sketch show “I Think You Should Leave,” but more practically the guy whose clips you send back and forth to your friends on a near-daily basis (and if not you, then all of the bro-iest bros you know)—was set to star in a theatrically released movie from A24, it still felt like a step into the big leagues.
For those of us who love his very particular (read: peculiar) brand of comedy, there was some question whether his sensibility would need to be blunted or broadened out in order to appeal to a mainstream audience.
Those fears are dispelled in the opening seconds of Friendship, which begins with a slow zoom out from the face of co-star Kate Mara describing her fragile mental state one year after winning a battle with cancer to reveal Robinson’s face coming slowly into frame, out of focus but recognizable. His expression is (and I say this lovingly) dumb as hell.
Immediately, my packed out theater burst out in laughter. Before he spoke a single word! His opening lines (which I won’t spoil) earned an explosion of laughter louder than anything I personally have heard in a movie theater in several years.
It’s important to note, this particular Los Angeles audience for the film’s opening weekend were quite clearly already massive fans of Robinson, and extremely familiar with his shtick.
Us superfans were treated over the next TKTIME to the kind of outrageous comedy that could only come from Robinson’s mind, an offbeat story of an insecure loser who falls under the spell of a charismatic neighbor (played by Paul Rudd) and loses his mind trying to become friends with him.
It was, for me, the funniest movie I’ve seen in a very long time. I’m talking out loud belly laughter multiple times, and the kinds of moments I’ll be quoting and referencing for years to come.
While I want to continue to heap hosannas on what is clearly one of my favorite movies of the year, I realize that for many people, perhaps most people, this comedy will not land. I know, because I’ve tried to show various people clips from Robinson’s show (or his orbit of comedians, such as Connor O’Malley, who I affectionately describe as Tim Robinson on crack).
In discussing the movie with my friend Smith (a fellow Robinson disciple who went to see the movie with me), we both agreed that the magic of the movie may not land outside the context of an extremely hot opening weekend crowd full of superfans. Had our environment completely skewed our reaction? (I remember walking out of an opening night screening of The Northman with an electric, downright bloodthirsty crowd and thinking it must be one of the best movies of that year, until I rewatched it).
We both came to a conclusion in the form of comparison: this was our version of Marvel fandom.
Marvel superfans go into MCU movies armed with years of appreciation and mountains of context. They jump for joy at callbacks or acknowledgements of the things that stir their memory of past glory, and are able to receive new moments in the exact context in which they were intended.
(I would argue, selfishly, that Friendship is slightly cleaner because a viewer is not required to bring extra-textual material into the movie to enjoy it. It’s not an extension of Robinson’s show in any tangible way, and there are several jokes and gags, Smith and I decided, that could make anyone with a pulse laugh.)
If you think about it, that comparison says a lot about the state of fandom in 2025. Gone are the days of what we used to call “broad” comedy, where a new movie starring Will Ferrell or Adam Sandler (before that an Eddie Murphy, Chevy Chase etc.) would set the comedic standard for the entire country.
It’s not that the monoculture is dead, but movie makers have clearly moved on from the idea of making something that pleases everyone. Movies are now made to superserve the superfans, and when something catches on in the mainstream, it’s only by people choosing to enter a specific circle of fandom.
Whether that means catching up on all the MCU lore for Thunderbolts, learning what “chicken jockey” means for A Minecraft Movie, or debating whether Ryan Coogler should’ve gotten the IP rights reverted for Sinners (a cinema nerd topic that I’m still not entirely sure wasn’t seeded by the movie’s marketing team), even the biggest movies of the year feel like niche rabbit holes we choose to fall down.
If you’re in the market for a new fandom to try out, might I suggest the extremely random, sophomoric, absurd and absolutely hilarious comedy stylings of one Mr. Tim Robinson?
Trailer Watch: Caught Stealing
My first reaction to this trailer is that it seems like a movie Guy Ritchie would direct — in the best possible way. Austin Butler’s character gets mixed up in a convoluted mess of interlocking gangs and groups, all of which have their own specific subcultures. Fun crime movies is not the usual vibe for Darren Aronofsky, who made Black Swan, Requiem For A Dream and The Whale, but he is no doubt an awesome director in his own right so I can’t wait to see what he does with it.
And the other big takeaway is Butler, who I’m going to continue to bet the house on as the truest star of this next crop of actors (Chalamet will be more famous and more rich but I think Butler is cooler and will have the better filmography). If I’m right, then this movie is going to be a big data point.