You CAN go wrong with Blue Steel.
While Ben Stiller has gotten over the disastrous results of the 2016 sequel Zoolander 2, he remembers how it all blindsided him during an episode of David Duchovny’s Fail Better podcast, People reported exclusively.
The original 2001 film was a massive hit, with Blue Steel — Derek Zoolander’s trademark face — ascribed to every pose and “being really, really ridiculously good looking” wasn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Zoolander 2’s scathing reviews and abysmal ratings
However, the sequel scored a 22% Tomatometer and 20% audience rating at Rotten Tomatoes. The original film, on the other hand, scored a respectable 60% Tomatometer and a much better 80% audience rating.
The 2001 Zoolander was made on a $28 million budget and earned $60.8 million worldwide. In contrast, Zoolander 2 had a $50 million budget and only made $56.7 million worldwide, $29 million of that domestically.
“I thought everybody wanted this. 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,” Stiller said about the sequel.
“It really freaked me out because I was like, ‘I didn’t know was that bad?’” the actor continued.
“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,” the Emmy winner said.
Ben Stiller’s over it
Nowadays, he can now look at the sequel’s flopping with a glass-half-full view since it allowed him to reset his priorities from cash-grab projects to diving headfirst into directing the 2018 Showtime miniseries Escape at Dannemora (nominated for 12 Primetime Emmys) and Severance (won two Emmys).
“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,” Stiller said.
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“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,” he continued.
“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.
When Duchovny asked if anger was the reason he didn’t want to make another comedy, Stiller replied that he was more hurt than anything. The actor said he always loved directing and over the course of the next 10 months, he was able to develop the miniseries. Stiller won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directing – Miniseries or TV Film for Escape at Dannemora and also served as producer for Severance.
How bad was it really?
But to go back to the actor’s statement earlier about not knowing Zoolander 2 was “that bad.” It was.
The sequel was bad on its own merits, but it suffers more when inevitably and logically compared to the original. The first one was fun and funny. It was also a hilariously scathing take on the modeling industry. Stiller and Wilson (Hansel) were great playing both dumb and clueless. The celebrity cameos made sense and was definitely in keeping with the theme. Will Ferrell’s Mugatu definitely served, as the youth say.
And then you have the sequel Zoolander 2, released 15 years later. The fact that the sequel took that long also plays a part in the harsh reviews the film received. If you read some of the reviews and most of the comments, they mention how it took 15 years to deliver a lackluster movie.
Obviously, the sequel didn’t take 15 years to make. Stiller made other movies between 2001 and 2016. The most notable of those is 2008’s Tropic Thunder where the actor played what seems to be the thespian version of Zoolander. He also wrote, directed and produced that movie.
Where did it go wrong?
So where did he go wrong with Zoolander 2?
First, 15 years is a long time. The first movie was fun, but was a sequel necessary? Not really. But a bad one just made it worse. Chalk it up to nostalgia of sorts. The audiences remember how much fun and funny the original Zoolander was. Maybe it should’ve remained a one-off so it’s the only Zoolander to remember.
Second, the celebrity cameos were overdone to the point of being unfunny. Zoolander worked because the cameos were both impressive and surprising. The sequel no longer had that to play with.
Third, it was just such a disjointed film. It felt as if it was made just so it could get made. It felt, dare I say it, like a cash grab. If it were, then it was a cash grab 15 years too late. The callbacks to the first movie would have worked better had Zoolander 2 been made only a few years after the original.
However, I hope Stiller has truly moved on from the withering reviews so he can make comedies again. It doesn’t have to be anything like Zoolander — in fact, I think he should retire the male model forever. It also doesn’t have to be a sequel to Tropic Thunder, no matter how beloved the film is.
It just has to be funny.
