Ben Stiller recently opened up about Zoolander 2 and how he was blindsided by the fact that it bombed at the box office.
As you might have expected, he was confused that the film flopped at the box office in a big way. The sequel was made on a $50 million budget and it ended up only making $29 million domestically.
The first movie was moderately successful and audiences seemed to enjoy it, so he thought that everybody wanted to see a sequel, but the numbers proved otherwise.
Stiller was recently a guest on David Duchovny’s podcast Fail Better , and when talking about the film’s failure, he said: “I thought everybody wanted this. And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really f***ed this up. Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews.”
He continued, “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 l’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.”
It probably didn’t help that Zoolander 2 was up against the first Deadpool movie, which dominated the box office at the time. Of course, everyone was more excited about Deadpool than Zoolander.
Stiller went on to talk about what came out of that experience: “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 added: “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 continued: “Even if somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t you go do another comedy or do this?’ I probably could have figured out something to do. But I just didn’t want to.
He said: “I was just hurt. Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do, I I always loved directing. I always loved making movies. I always, in my mind, loved the idea of just directing movies that since I was a kid, and not necessarily comedies. And so, over the course of like the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series.”
The series that he is referring to are Escape From Dannemora and Severance.
I thought Zoolander 2 was right in line with the first movie. No better, not worse, just silly wacky comedy. While Stiller was feeling a little down in the dumps, he ended up picking himself back up and creating more great and entertaining entertainment!
via People
