'Another Simple Favor's Paul Feig On State of Comedy, Blake Lively & Anna Kendrick: SXSW
Comedy is hard, but Paul Feig keeps at it.
As such, the big screen hitmaker can celebrate having two feature comedies in release this year: the sequel to his 2018 sleeper, A Simple Favor –Another Simple Favor, which just world premiered at SXSW on the fest’s opening night– and the Christmas Day Lionsgate release The Housemaid starring Sydney Sweeney, Amanda Seyfried and Brandon Sklenar.
Is it harder to make comedies nowadays for the big screen? Answers Feig, “Audiences have gotten very suspicious about comedies, straight up comedy. That’s why so much comedy exists in mixed genres; horror is the new comedy.”
“I think audiences at the moment look at straight up comedy as being frivolous,” he says, “or that we’re trying to pull something over them.”
“Audiences need stakes,” is Feig’s verdict when it comes to big screen laughs.
In our interview above he talks about cracking a sequel to A Simple Favor (he doesn’t like to do them) with scribes Jessica Sharzer and Laeta Kalogridis, the genesis of having part two take place in Capri, and the immediate, organic shorthand that Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively have had since the first film. The first scene he shot with them for Another Simple Favor was Kendrick’s Stephanie doing a dead-man bob in the pool next to Lively’s unfazed Emily.
“There’s nothing funnier than Anna playing drunk” says Feig.
While Amazon MGM Studios’ The Accountant 2 is getting an April 25 theatrical release, Another Simple Favor was always destined for Prime, its drop date being May 1. That decision boils down to whether the motion picture studio and streamer can make back their marketing costs in a global theatrical release. The first A Simple Favor made $53.5M domestic, $97.6M worldwide.
