Is the seriocomedy in danger of extinction?
The ‘seriocomedy’ sub-genre happens to be one of my favorite including movies like The Apartment, Risky Business, As Good As It Gets, Almost Famous, American Beauty and Up in the Air. Is it in “danger of extinction”? Per 24 Frames:
Some may be inclined to read the soft results for “The Dilemma,” the Vince Vaughn-Kevin James movie that opened to $21 million over the holiday weekend, as evidence of the waning power of its stars, or perhaps the diminished appeal of the bromance. But there may be a more specific lesson in the struggles of the Ron Howard movie, which actually plays more serious than some of its ads imply.
The adult drama has been the subject of numerous obituaries in recent years, but looking at the success of movies like “The Social Network” and “Black Swan,” it’s doing just fine. What hasn’t fared so well is the seriocomedy, a story of real people with real problems that also contains its share of laughs — the drama, essentially, that wears its seriousness lightly.
In the 1980s, this kind of film was common, and commonly successful, particularly from a certain generation of American filmmaker: Lawrence Kasdan’s “The Big Chill,” James L. Brooks’ “Broadcast News,” Sydney Pollack’s “Tootsie,” John Hughes’ “Planes, Trains & Automobiles” and so on.
These days? Not so much. In the last six months, nearly every attempt at the seriocomedy has struggled, certainly with audiences and sometimes with critics. First came “Cyrus,” then “The Switch,” followed by “It’s Kind of a Funny Story,” “Love and Other Drugs” and now “The Dilemma.”
In 2009, “The 40-Year-Old Virgin” director Judd Apatow faltered trying a seriocomedy with “Funny People.” Brooks, who practically pioneered the genre not only with “Broadcast News” but “Terms of Endearment,” struck out in 2010 with “How Do You Know.” If you were a studio executive, you could hardly be blamed if you read a good script for a seriocomedy and promptly threw it on the reject pile. (The lone exception seems to be “The Kids Are All Right,” a movie that came from well outside the studio system and proved reasonably successful last summer.)
The seriocomedy has never been easy creative ground for directors. To make a good one you need to be proficient at constructing both laughs and drama, and have the dexterity to switch between them. From a business standpoint it’s even dicier: How, in this age of marketing, do you retail these tweeners?
For years the conventional wisdom, as noted in the article, is that adult dramas were in danger of going ‘extinct.’ Then along came The Social Network, The King’s Speech, and True Grit. Voila! Adult dramas are back! Why? How about this: Because these three are good films with compelling characters and plots. So more likely the issue wasn’t adult dramas, but rather poor adult dramas.
Could this perchance be what’s going on with seriocomedies? The issue not being so much about the sub-genre’s possible extinction per se, but rather a negative pattern established by the release of poor seriocomedies?
Consumer taste and the movie business is all about the quality of content and cultural cycles. I guarantee within two years, there will be an article with this headline: “Seriocomedies are all the rage!”
Takeaway: If you have a seriocomedy spec script you want to write, you think it’s a strong concept, and you’re totally passionate about it, do not let the weak box office performance of The Dilemma and How Do You Know dissuade you from writing it. Any great script, no matter the genre, will find its way to motivated buyers.
For more of the article, go here.