Zoolander 2 flopping affected Ben Stiller for a long time
Ben Stiller was "hurt" by the reaction to his 2016 Zoolander sequel, saying the flop really freaked him out
Aux News Zoolander
Sequels to big, dumb, beloved comedies are almost always a bad idea: inevitably disappointing, rarely capturing the magic of the original, often seemingly like a desperate cash grab. (See: Blues Brothers 2000, Caddyshack II, etc.) But Ben Stiller must’ve thought he was exempt when he took a stab at a second Zoolander. “I thought everybody wanted this,” he reflected on an episode of David Duchovny’s upcoming podcast Fail Better (via People). “And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really fucked this up. Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews.’”
He explained to Duchovny (who appeared in Zoolander), “It really freaked me out because I was like, ‘I didn’t know was that bad?’ What scared me the most on that one was I’m losing what I think what’s funny, the questioning yourself … on Zoolander 2, it was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time.”
No wonder Stiller was so “trepidatious,” as Justin Long put it, about signing on for a Dodgeball sequel. (Vince Vaughn’s pitch for Dodgeball 2 is moving forward, but so far Stiller doesn’t seem to be involved.) But the actor-director now sees a silver lining to the Zoolander 2 flop. “The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said ‘Make Zoolander 3 right now,’ or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that,” he said on the pod. “But I had this space to kind of sit with myself and have to deal with it and other projects that I had been working on—not comedies, some of them—I have the time to actually just work on and develop.”
Stiller “probably could have figured out something to do” if he had been commissioned to make another comedy, “But I just didn’t want to,” he said, admitting that he felt “hurt” by the failure of Zoolander 2. Instead, he shifted focus to television, going on to produce and direct the award-winning series Escape At Dannemora and Severance. “Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do, [I] always loved directing. I always loved making movies. I always, in my mind, loved the idea of just directing movies [since] I was a kid, and not necessarily comedies,” he said. “And so, over the course of the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series.”
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Worth it for Severance.
This. If Zoolander 2 had to flop for him to make Severance and Escape at Dannemora then we’re all the better that it did.
David Duchovny has a podcast?
Yes. It’s called Fail Better.
Also, The X-Files is on the Comet network every night (thank you YouTubeTV) and it still pretty much holds up as a very watchable show. I started rewatching them in the middle (Season Five) and am kind of looking forward to watching Season One again from the beginning.
Much has been made about how awful the Buffy remaster was – and rightfully – but nowhere near enough has been said about how amazing the X-file remaster was. I started watching on SBS On Demand down here, and I was like seven early episodes in before I realis that, um, hey…weren’t these meant to be in 4:3?It really looks like it was shot today, just with perfect nineties props, costumes, and locations. There’s a few cropping goofs that couldn’t be helped, but that’s it. It’s no over-smoothed, there’s no cropping of heads and chins for close-ups, the remasters have conveyed the intent of the creators well.
To me that’s the bigger story here.
most podcasts these days are just b-level celebrities calling in favors from their friends and former coworkers.
Also, the perpetual rotating buffet of British stand-ups guesting on each other’s shows and podcasts.
And PFT
Same.
Are you serious? The article just told you that a moment ago.
Who doesn’t?
You serious? They just told you that a moment ago. . .
no kidding, nobody “wanted this”, as Stiller assumed (still assumes?). by the time – fifteen years later! – it came out, Zoolander 1 was already reduced to meme status. what did he think would happen.
Ah yes, the reductive staying power of a meme. I’m not saying a sequel was a good idea, but if your first movie has generated a slew of memes that indicates longevity and a place in the pop culture consciousness, not some irrelevant digital ghetto.
I don’t know. I think that might possibly be the case now but I don’t think it was the case in 2001. Plus there’s good meme status and bad meme status, and in that case, it was bad meme status.
I don’t think we’re talking memes in 2001; by 2010/2015, Zoolander gifs were going around pretty regularly. Zoolander was part of the cultural language for lots of people who were young when it came out in 2001. Like the driving to get orange mocha frappacinos gif was very common, and “Blue Steel” was regularly seen in comments for pictures where someone is intentionally or unintentionally looking self-serious.
“Like the driving to get orange mocha frappacinos gif was very common,”I’ll definitely have to take your word on that one, though I do remember blue steel being common.
It was very common. You must be taking crazy pills.
I’m not taking crazy pills. I’m just not chronically online enough to see every use of Zoolander memes.
“I feel like I’m taking crazy pills” is another Zoolander meme.https://giphy.com/gifs/zoolander-will-ferrell-mugatu-NPyHgTkMStCXC
Welp. I’m clearly not the target audience for this film or its resulting memes.
i mean shit ‘blue steel’ itself is just a commonly used term.
Wait, you’re saying Zoolander was a bad meme? Man, you and I hang in some different corners of the internet because I’ve only ever seen people talk about it as a cult classic. I don’t think a sequel was a good idea, because no comedy sequel after 15 years is a good idea, but let’s not rewrite history here.
We do because I don’t know a lot of people who used Zoolander as a meme anyway, and the only guy I did know who did was super annoying. But maybe I’m biased because I thought the movie was stupid also.
Thankyou! I never understood the love for ‘Zoolander’ that so many people had. It always seemed to me a pretty mid film, the best joke of which is an ad lib after Stiller forgot his actual line.
I’ve struggled to like Ben Stiller comedies in general. I remember when everyone was going crazy over There’s Something About Mary, and I was excited to see it, and then I was like…that’s what everyone thought was so funny? And then Meet the Parents didn’t make me laugh at all. Didn’t like Tropic Thunder. The only one I liked was Dodgeball, but I consider that a Vince Vaughn movie rather than a Ben Stiller movie, and Ben Stiller’s character was the worst part of it. And the thing is I think Ben Stiller seems like a nice guy! I don’t hate him or anything—he and I just don’t share the same definition of funny, I guess. I kind of liked The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.So I should thank the failure of Zoolander 2 for steering him away from comedy for a while.
I think Winona Ryder’s character should have ended up with his character rather than with Ethan Hawke’s in Reality Bites.
I’ve somehow never seen Reality Bites.
It’s an imperfect film to be sure, but it’s a useful snapshot of early 1990s GenX angst. Pretty much all the same problems that Millennials (and now GenZ) face were there then. It turns out that a lot of problems that get associated with “generations” are basically the same problems that young people in any generation face and I wish young people would get this as opposed to thinking that they’re the first people to ever face what they’re facing.
I’ve never actually seen the movie all the way through, but Zoolander always felt like it fell on the good meme side. Like the memes were shared because people liked and were making memes of memorable, intentionally funny parts.To me, bad meme status would be something like Morbius memes. Where it’s just making fun of a bad movie.
would have been a huge selling point 10 years ago, too.
Right? When he said “I thought everybody wanted this,” my first thought was who the hell told you this? That’s why you have to listen to people other than your management staff.
Now I’m just picturing Stiller standing in front of Apu getting harangued a la the “Billy and the Clonosaurus” bit.“WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?”
I think now it might work as a nostalgia piece, or a pseudo-nostalgia piece, for all the folks who haven’t watched it but now it’s references. Straight to streaming and not having a whole to-do in the theaters.
I’m sure it seemed like a good idea at the time. What could go wrong?
I bet he regrets having learned to read good.
Especially since he learned to read at a school for ants.
i see the (flawed) logic. the movie was a theatrical flop, but he could squint and blame 9/11. it also sold a shit-ton of dvds, but he failed to realize that impulse buying a $5 movie at a gas station doesn’t translate to box office sales.
There’s a Zoolander 2? Holy shit, it bombed so hard it knocked itself out of the collective consciousness
That was my first thought.
I remember reading something recent about it and I was like “no, this didn’t actually come out, did it?” It turns out it did and I maybe even saw it? But it was so unmemorable that almost everyone has just wiped it from their mind.
Another day bad sequel, another “comedian fucks around and finds out”
No wonder Stiller was so “trepidatious,” as Justin Long put it, about signing on for a Dodgeball sequel.He should embrace that feeling. Nobody wants a Dodgeball sequel either, especially not 20 years later.
That Lance Armstrong cameo aged pretty well, huh?
Ditto for Chuck Norris
If it doesn’t have Rip Torn throwing wrenches at people, then it shouldn’t be made!
As a huge fan of the first Zoolander, it pains me to say the sequel was absolutely, irredeemably unwatchable. Did Stiller learn nothing from the critical/audience response to Anchorman 2? Resurrecting a comedy after 10+ years for a sequel RARELY works. I’m sure someone in the comments will come up with an example of one that actually did, but I’m drawing a blank.
high concept stuff like borat 2, pee wee’s holiday and bill & ted 3 worked, but they are far and away the exceptions. even comedy sequels made soon after don’t have a great hit ratio.
Anchorman 2 had a few great moments (like the whole baby shark thing, the song in particular, or the date at the laundromat), but it was mostly made to get Paramount to bankroll The Big Short, which was the film Adam McKay really wanted to make.
Big Short is great and Anchorman 2 is fine and entertaining at times. I don’t see an issue
Not sure if it counts because the follow-ups weren’t movies but Wet Hot American Summer had a prequel and sequel in TV form on Netflix that came out 10+ years after the movie (both were one-season each). And they were both pretty great.
Oh there you go. Wet Hot American Summer is one of my favorite comedies of all time. I was shocked by how not awful the Netflix revivals were.
Michael Showalter > Ben Stiller
I do sympathize with Stiller’s take on this. I LOVE Zoolander and will absolutely watch it any time its on. I would probably watch it if I was on a plane and someone three rows ahead of me in the aisle was watching it. So it surprised me greatly because despite being excited when the sequel was announced, when it finally came out… I had zero interest in seeing it. Maybe I had already seen the terrible reviews, but i still have not seen a second of it.
It’s a movie that gradually built a following over a long period of time after release, but even that fanbase mostly liked it because of how silly and offbeat it was. That’s not really a formula for a successful belated sequel.
You gotta do the safe picture. Then you can do the art picture. But then sometimes you gotta do the payback picture because your friend says you owe him.
I deeply appreciate this Jay and Silent Bob reference.
I deeply appreciate this Jay and Silent Bob reference.
Zoolander N° 2 was terrible. I admit that I’m a huge fan of the original (my avatar here, until they were all deleted, was a capture of Jacob Moogberg playing the keytar before he became Mugatu). I barely laughed at the sequel, when I saw it in a theater, and it was only about the orgy subplot with Hansel.The most irritating thing about this sequel is the same issue that affects stuff like Sharknado or the Birdemic sequel. It was filled with cameos of people who wanted to show that they were on the joke. They got Anna Wintour, ffs. The original Zoolander was a superficial satire of a superficial industry, where ridiculous rules would apply. And there were a few dark undertones, curtesy of original writer Drake Sather, like the whole “Derelict” concept. The light touch made it work, while other films about the fashion industry (such as Robert Altman’s Prêt-à-porter) felt contrived (Phantom Thread is great however). The sequel put everything to 11, and it was awful.As Stiller admits himself, it has at least caused him to reconsider his priorities. If Zoolander N° 2 was unfunny and sank like a stone, so Severance could rise, I’ll take the tradeoff.
Agreed that no one wanted a sequel to this. Even at the time, I assumed this was a quick paycheck for Stiller. I also think he is too smart to actually believe the bs he is shoveling here.As a random aside, I am not sure Zoolander would get made today. Too edgy for kids, too light for teens/adults, mid-budget ($28 mil), 90 minutes. As mentioned, it flopped in theaters, but found second life on DVD at a time when that was a possibility.
Kind of ironic that Stiller’s reaction to Zoolander 2 was the exact reaction Derek Zoolander had when he thought he won then realized he lost the Model of the Year award to Hansel.
The Justin Beiber cold opening is hilarious. If you didn’t laugh out loud as Bieber is about to die, but uses his last breaths to choose the right instgram filter wasn’t funny… I got nothin for you. Go watch deadpool
*strained expression* …but why a sequel?
Gee, Ben . . . dry your tears with $100 bills.
Hear me out. Since he directed the original film, Reality Bites 2. Nostalgic older Gen X movie with him, Winona and Hawke (both having career resurgences(. It’s another step away from from the goofball comedy stuff and more in line with his more introspective work.
Honestly, I just want another good 90’s soundtrack. Hell, combine the cast with Singles and I’ll buy the double cassette OST.
At least he can say it was a better movie than Will Ferril’s Sherlock Holmes film.