By 2001 comedy “Zoolander” was a solid performer for its star, co-writer and director Ben Stiller – scoring good reviews and pulling in $60.8 million against a budget of $28 million.
The sequel in 2016 however, which cost almost twice as much to create, ended up earning several million less and was widely considered a box-office flop. Critics may have liked the first film, but the second was widely panned.
The film opened in fourth place with $14 million, beaten by the first “Deadpool” which earned nearly ten times as much that weekend along with “Kung Fu Panda 3” and the largely forgotten about comedy “How to Be Single”.
Eight years on, Stiller has spoken about the film’s failure whilst appearing on David Duchovny’s podcast Fail Better (via People) and says its failure blindsided him:
“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. 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.”
The poor showing led to Stiller trying to reinvent himself which ultimately led to his work producing/directing acclaimed non-comedic work such as the mini-series “Escape From Dannemora” and the Apple TV+ series “Severance”:
“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.
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.
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. I was just hurt.
Finding yourself in terms of what creatively you want to be and do, 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. So, over the course of like the next like, nine or 10 months, I was able to develop these limited series.”
The second season of “Severance” recently wrapped filming ahead of a likely Fall 2024/early 2025 premiere.
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