As I’ve noted before, it’s easy to assume that Kevin Smith cast Seth Rogen in Zach and Miri Make A Porno in an effort to capture some of the magic dust that makes Judd Apatow’s films so financially successful, while remining the audience that Kevin Smith movies have offered a blend of raunchy comedy and surprisingly traditional romantic resolutions for a decade and a half now. In a post today at Burbanked, Alan Lopuszynski questions whether Adam Sandler is currently starring in Judd Apatow’s Funny People for the inverse reason.
“At first, I figured that Sandler’s interest in working under Apatow as a director was because Sandler was on a downslope of box office returns at this point in his career,” writes Alan Lopuszynski at Burbanked. But then he got out the virtual graph paper, and realised that although Judd Apatow’s films are vastly more appreciated by critics than Sandlers, “the pair’s financial track records are extremely similar” — and when there has been a discrepancy, Sandler’s films have almost always grossed more than Apatow’s.
And so Alan coins a term to explain the collaboration: