After this year’s SXSW, there were two comedies that seemingly rose above the rest as films that would likely be big hits for their studios — “Booksmart” and “Good Boys.” Interestingly, both had very similar plots, as groups of friends go on a madcap adventure in hopes of arriving at a party and making out with someone. But with both films already released in theaters, the box office results for the two films are pretty far apart. And one of the filmmakers involved with “Booksmart” has a couple of reasons she feels her film didn’t have the financial impact that “Good Boys” has had.
Speaking to Yahoo, director Olivia Wilde looks back at the box office performance of “Booksmart” and discusses some issues that might have led to the film underperforming. The female-led comedy carried a reported budget of $6 million before factoring in the amount Annapurna paid for marketing. However, despite the film doing pretty well for a low-budget indie, pulling in a domestic total of over $22 million, “Booksmart” was released in over 2,500 screens, which is normally reserved for major studio releases, giving the film seemingly unfair expectations. [For comparison’s sake, “Good Boys” has earned over $60 million domestically.]
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“Listen, I think it’s two-fold. I think, on the one hand, the very simple answer is [‘Good Boys’] had Universal Studios behind it,” Wilde said. “It’s not an indie. That was a Universal Studios movie. They have a massive marketing machine, and they’re incredibly good at it.”
She added, “I also think that, you know, people are more accustomed to male-dominated comedies, and there is still a certain reluctance to believe that women can make you laugh as hard. And that still exists, which is sort of nuts to you and me… But there’s still a lot of work to be done to say, like, hey, this is not a male-dominated game.”
Of course, there were also many film fans that wrote off “Booksmart” as just the “female version of ‘Superbad.’” And Wilde is well aware of those comparisons, though she thinks the connotations is a bit reductive and unfortunate.
“[‘Superbad’ is] amazing,” the director said. “But I did feel that we should stand alone. Hopefully, that’s a kind of pattern that we’ll grow out of. Movies don’t have to be the female version of anything. You know? And one day there will be a male ‘Booksmart.’”
Regardless of the box office mistakes, which I covered in a whole different piece, nothing can change the fact that “Booksmart” is a truly great film and a hilarious comedy that deserves to be seen by everyone. However, there’s no one reason as to why “Booksmart” wasn’t the massive hit that Annapurna, Wilde, and the rest of the cast/crew believed it could be. One can only hope that the film has a long life on home release.
