In 2001, Ben Stiller wrote, directed, and starred in the comedy “Zoolander.” It was a huge hit grossing over $60 million at the worldwide box office on a $28 million budget. Given this was one of Stiller’s biggest hits a, fairly delayed, sequel followed in 2016, which tanked.
The “Tropic Thunder” star recently admitted he felt blindsided by the flop.
Stiller’s Reaction
“I thought everybody wanted this,” Stiller told David Duchovny on a recent episode of the “Fail Better” podcast. “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?’” he said. “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.”
“Zoolander 2” made a little over $56 million worldwide, which may not sound like a big difference from the first film. But the sequel was made on a $50 million budget, almost double what the original cost. It was also almost universally critically panned. This was not the result anyone expected given 15 years of fans begging for a follow-up.
Lessons Learned
Stiller has chosen to take the failure of “Zoolander 2” as a teaching moment. “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 explains. “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,” Stiller added. “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.”
“Zoolander 2” reminds us that there is no fool-proof formula for Hollywood. This should have been a hit with every element in its favor. Seriously, who would bet against blue steel? But it still failed to deliver at the box office.
