Hollywood Doesn’t Want Comedies
Years ago, the blockbuster comedy was a key to any studio’s profit margin, given their relative cheapness to produce and propensity to linger in theaters on good word of mouth. Now, as worldwide box office becomes more crucial to the studio’s bottom line, comedies are vanishing from the schedule—because, in the words of one distributor, they don’t “travel well.†I’m not going to get to teary-eyed about this development. TV and Netflix have plenty of comedies, and if I want a Hollywood comedy now I turn to something vintage on TCM.
