Rogen: Superbad Could Never Get Made in Hollywood Today
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- Seth Rogen told The New York Times that Superbad, the 2007 comedy he co-wrote, 'would never happen today in a hundred million years' because Hollywood is now '100 percent' risk-averse.
- Rogen contrasted Superbad's original production — bought as a script, given a release date, cast, and shot on the studio's schedule for $20 million — with today's requirement that directors and A-list cast be attached before a film is greenlit.
- Rogen singled out former Sony head Amy Pascal as an executive willing to greenlight a movie first and cast the funniest people second, saying that philosophy is no longer articulated in Hollywood.
- Rogen praised the recent box office runs of horror films Obsession and Backrooms, both from young YouTube-hailing writer-directors, calling them 'totally in line with advice I've been giving people for years.'
- Rogen revealed he met Backrooms director Kane Parsons, now 20 years old, four years ago, and described Hollywood as 'a volatile industry' where 'every few years there's a tectonic shift.'
Why it matters: Rogen, a four-time Emmy winner and current studio co-creator, isn't theorizing — he's citing a concrete case (Superbad's $20M budget, year-long timeline, Amy Pascal's greenlight) to argue that mid-budget comedy has been structurally priced out of the system. His own praise for YouTube-hailing filmmakers like 20-year-old Kane Parsons suggests the gap created by studio risk aversion is already being filled by outsiders.
