Ben Stiller opens up about Zoolander 2‘s field workplace when it premiered, saying he felt “blindsided” by the outcomes.
Stiller directed the motion comedy sequel, which he co-wrote alongside Justin Theroux, Nick Stoller, and John Hamburg. It was launched in 2016 and opened to $15.9M over a Valentine’s weekend. The movie grossed domestically $29M with a $50M price range.
“I thought everybody wanted this,” Stiller mentioned on David Duchovny’s podcast Fail Better (through People). “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.”
He continued, “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.”
Zoolander 2 competed with Deadpool, which dominated the field workplace in its premiere weekend with $152.2M. How To Be Single additionally dropped the identical weekend and topped Stiller’s movie, producing $19.9M over the identical four-day interval.
The outcomes of Zoolander 2 led Stiller to reinvent himself and consider different concepts, in the end resulting in Escape From Dannemora and 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,” he mentioned. “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,” he added. “I was just hurt. 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.”