The R-rated comedy heyday is over. Vince Vaughn recently appeared on the YouTube interview show “Hot Ones,” where he talked about why Hollywood no longer makes the kinds of R-rated comedies he used to star in. “They just overthink it,” said Vaughn, 54.
“And it’s like, it’s crazy, you get these rules, like, if you did geometry, and you said 87 degrees was a right angle, then all your answers are messed up, instead of 90 degrees. So there became some idea or concept, like, they would say something like, ‘You have to have an IP.’” Vaughn, who is currently starring in the Bill Lawrence series “Bad Monkey” (premiering Aug.
14 on AppleTV+), rose to fame starring in R-rated comedies such as “Swingers,” “Old School,” co-starring Will Ferrell and Luke Wilson, “Wedding Crashers,” co-starring Owen Wilson, Isla Fisher, Bradley Cooper, and Rachel McAdams, and “The Watch.” The comedies all had R-rated language, nudity and sex. In “Wedding Crashers,” Vaughn played a character who crashed weddings and lied to women about his identity in order to sleep with them.
Vaughn cited the board game Battleship as an example of IP that became a “vehicle for storytelling” for the sole reason that it had a recognizable name. “The people in charge don’t want to get fired more, so than they’re looking to do something great, so they want to kind of follow a set of rules that somehow get set in stone, that don’t really translate,” Vaughn said, referri.