Comedy Got Old. Now It Wants Its Own ‘Backrooms’ Moment

Zach Cregger, Jordan Peele and now Curry Barker have all slid between comedy and horror for good reason. “The rhythms of comedy are not dissimilar from the rhythms of scares,” says producer Todd Lieberman — and both, in a theater, are communal: “When you laugh with other people, it’s better than when you’re laughing by yourself.”

Lieberman would know. Before producing The Housemaid, he made his bones in comedy — as a twentysomething Summit exec he chased the foreign rights to American Pie, talked a German distributor into paying $4 million and watched the film clear roughly $130 million overseas. “To me, it wasn’t American comedy,” he says. “It was universal comedy.”

These days those kinds of multiples belong almost exclusively to horror. In the past month, Focus’ Obsession grew for three straight weekends toward a likely $300 million; A24 and Chernin’s Backrooms opened to an A24-record $81.4 million and will land near $300 million too. They were made for $750,000 and $10 million — by directors aged 26 and 20 — and they’re two of the first Gen Z-specific horror hits.

Comedy, meanwhile, got old. Fast. The summer’s two R-rated studio comedies are both from Paramount: a Scary Movie revival (first launched in 2000, the new title opened with a franchise-best $55 million before cratering in week two) and the upcoming Jackass: Best and Last, the 26-year-old franchise’s farewell. Last summer it was a reboot of the 1988 hit Naked Gun. Notwithstanding Sony’s Keke Palmer–SZA winner One of Them Days (which made $51.8 million), the era of an American Pie or an Apatow pack pic pulling young crowds into theaters are gone. For now.

The way back may run through the same playbook horror just used.

Today, I dig into what it will take for comedy to reclaim young audiences, the digital players already proving the model, and more ways Hollywood could repeat horror’s success — or blow it — in this space, including:

• The crazy stat that shows how far theatrical comedy has fallen in the past decade
• Where Hollywood’s development breaks down and ruins comedy

• The YouTube-native players trying to build comedy’s next farm system
• Why a comedy without a star on the poster now “just feels like streaming”
• Why a director bought an abandoned high school in Syracuse — and how Netflix came to order 28 episodes there
• The $2 million movie betting that one viral clip can sell a film