Latest news with #Apatow
Yahoo
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Academy Museum Sets Judd Apatow As Guest Curator For 2027 Comedy Film Exhibition
Judd Apatow is breaking ground as the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures' first-ever guest curator for its upcoming comedy film exhibition. Set to debut in April 2027, the museum announced the series on Friday as the writer, director and producer participated in a 20th anniversary screening of his feature directorial debut The 40-Year-Old Virgin (2005) with the movie's cast. More from Deadline Glen Powell & Judd Apatow Teaming On Comedy At Universal 'Parasite' Producer CJ ENM Signs Partnership With Academy Museum To Boost Asian Content Judd Apatow & Ben Stiller Celebrate 30th Anniversary Of 'Heavyweights': "I Don't Think This Will Be At The Head Of The Disney+ Queue Ever" 'The cat is out of the bag! I'll be working with the Academy Museum to showcase some of my favorite films and filmmakers throughout the ages,' said Apatow in a statement. 'I am honored to curate this project alongside the museum's talented team and with access to the Academy Collection. We hope to leave visitors inspired and, of course, with a big smile on their faces.' The untitled exhibition will be the Academy Museum's first dedicated to the art of comedy in film, utilizing some of the 52 million items in the Academy Collection. 'We're thrilled to announce that our first guest curator at the Academy Museum is none other than the hilarious and brilliant Judd Apatow,' said Academy Museum Director and President Amy Homma in a statement. 'Judd's comedies have shaped entertainment and culture, and we know his expertise, appreciation, and love for the art of comedy will bring a unique exhibition to our audiences.' Apatow was joined Friday by 40-Year-Old Virgin stars Steve Carell, Catherine Keener, Jane Lynch, Kat Dennings and Gerry Bednob, participating in a panel before the anniversary screening. Since making his directorial debut with the 2005 comedy, Apatow has added such titles as Knocked Up (2007), Funny People (2009), This Is 40 (2012), Trainwreck (2015), The King of Staten Island (2020) and The Bubble (2022) to his repertoire. Best of Deadline 2025 TV Cancellations: Photo Gallery Brad Pitt's Apple 'F1' Movie: Everything We Know So Far Everything We Know About 'Nine Perfect Strangers' Season 2 So Far
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Glen Powell to Star in Judd Apatow Untitled Comedy at Universal
Universal Pictures is fast-tracking an untitled original comedy about a country western star in free fall from Judd Apatow ('Trainwreck,' 'King Of Staten Island') and Glen Powell ('Twisters,' 'Hit Man'), the studio announced on Thursday. Apatow will direct the film with Powell set to star. Apatow and Powell are set to write the script together. Apatow will produce through his longstanding Apatow Productions overall deal with the Studio. Apatow's relationship with the Studio dates back to his 2005 directorial debut, 'The 40-Year-Old Virgin,' and he has since directed 'Knocked Up,' 'Funny People,' 'This is 40,' 'Trainwreck' and 'The King of Staten Island' for the Studio. Powell and Dan Cohen will produce through Barnstorm's newly minted first look deal with the Studio. This new collaboration with Apatow is the second project to be produced with Universal since Barnstorm announced their first look deal in February. Powell's relationship with the Studio originates with his starring role in 'Twisters,' which overperformed against all industry expectations, becoming the biggest opening for a natural disaster film ever at the domestic box office and grossing $267.8 million overall in the domestic box office. Barnstorm is also producing the recently announced 'The Natural Order' for the studio, with Powell attached to star and Barry Jenkins attached to direct. Kevin Misher will produce through Misher Films. Misher has a storied history with Universal Pictures, where he was President of Production from 1996-2001 and supervised production for some of the Studio's most acclaimed features, including 'Erin Brockovich,' 'The Fast and the Furious,' 'Meet the Parents,' and 'The Mummy.' Misher subsequently formed Misher Films, where he has been producing a variety of films over the past two decades, including 'Fighting With My Family,' 'Coming 2 America' and 'You People.' Senior Executive Vice President of Production Development Erik Baiers will oversee the project on behalf of the studio. Apatow is repped by WME, Mosaic, ID and Ziffren Brittenham LLP. Powell is repped by CAA and Johnson Shapiro Slewett & Kole. The post Glen Powell to Star in Judd Apatow Untitled Comedy at Universal appeared first on TheWrap.
The Guardian
29-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
From Hollywood's goofy stoner to serious satire: the reinvention of Seth Rogen
In Seth Rogen's new satirical series, The Studio, Rogen plays the newly appointed head of a major Hollywood production company – and there was a time when that alone would have been the joke. The goofy, schlubby, pre-eminent manchild of mainstream comedy, handed the role of a powerful industry suit – the fish-out-of-water jokes would have written themselves. But Matt Remick, Rogen's character in The Studio, isn't a manchild but a man: a pretty regular middle-aged one, trying to do good, honest work in a sour, cynical business. It's the industry around Matt, rather, that appears stuck in a state of arrested development, as he's handed one lazy, juvenile, IP-milking movie pitch after another (including a Kool-Aid origin story that sounds almost too plausible to be parodic) while trying to hold on to his soul. Back in the mid-2000s, Rogen broke through in Hollywood as the very picture of wise-cracking, dope-smoking slackerdom; nearly 20 years later, the Canadian actor and filmmaker is perilously close to playing the straight man. Off-screen, too, Rogen has shaped up and grown up, even if he remains the most enthusiastic marijuana advocate in showbiz. The Studio, which he devised and directed with his longtime creative partner Evan Goldberg, may be the crispest embodiment yet of Rogen's more mature persona, but it's not an abrupt about-face: now 42, the star has been quietly and cannily tweaking his public and professional image over the years, correcting past missteps and modelling a progressive attitude where many straight white dudebro comics have turned bitter or defensive against the perceived onset of new, 'woke' industry standards. 'The complaint that comedy's harder than it used to be is not a valid complaint,' Rogen said in an Esquire interview earlier this year. 'Maybe it was too easy before. And why should it be? Why shouldn't it be hard? I like that my job is hard, because I'm trying to do something that requires a huge amount of resources and people's time and energy.' The quote went viral, attracting applause from critics and viewers, weary of more entrenched, demographically predictable culture-war positions. Funny, perceptive and sufficiently switched on to have attracted guest stars ranging from Martin Scorsese to Sarah Polley to Netflix CEO Ted Sarandos, The Studio suggests Rogen is coping just fine with that degree of difficulty. The younger, hotter-headed Rogen may not have recognised such gentle diplomacy. Raised in a middle-class Jewish household in Vancouver, the young Rogen saw his family background as material for irreverent stand-up routines before, aged just 16, landing a role as an acerbic high-school outcast in Judd Apatow's cult teen TV series Freaks and Geeks. The gig gained Rogen a steady place in Apatow's so-called comic 'frat pack,' and it was Apatow who gave Rogen, at 25, his first starring vehicle. In the hit 2007 romcom Knocked Up, he and Katherine Heigl, then hot property from TV's Grey's Anatomy, played reluctant parents-to-be following a drunken one-night stand. It was a classic comedy of mismatch, mining laughs from the friction between Heigl's Type-A career-woman character and Rogen's shaggy stoner; though it was well received at the time, its hard, blank female characterisation and sympathetic stance toward male jocularity would meet with more criticism in a post-#MeToo age. Heigl herself was a sceptic at the time, stating in interviews not long after the film's release that she found it 'a little sexist': 'It paints the women as shrews, as humourless and uptight and it paints the men as lovable, goofy, fun-loving guys.' Rogen, pressed for a response by radio shock-jock Howard Stern, responded rashly. 'It's not like we're the only people she said some batshit crazy things about,' he said. 'That's kind of her bag now.' Rogen would walk back these comments years later, though this minor feud cast both stars' images in stone for a few years. Heigl, sure enough, was branded as humourless and uptight and hard to work with, as her career momentum soon stalled; Rogen, depending on your point of view, was either a fun hang or a boorish loose cannon. Either way, he was better business. In the same summer as Knocked Up, the broad, lewd teen comedy Superbad – which he wrote with Goldberg, and in which he played a supporting role – became an instant generational touchstone, cementing the distinctiveness of Rogen's comic voice both on and off camera. That swift one-two of unexpected blockbusters cued a steady stream of work for the unlikely star, including such scattershot vehicles as Observe and Report and Zack and Miri Make a Porno, and a green light for his own most indulgent projects: together with indie director David Gordon Green, he and Goldberg attempted to resurrect the moribund stoner-comedy genre with the daft, suitably incoherent Pineapple Express, the moderate commercial success of which seems a generous effect of the Knocked Up/Superbad afterglow. Other writing credits went less well: the Owen Wilson comedy was a witless dud, The Green Hornet an expensive superhero flop, The Watch an instantly forgettable (and forgotten) sci-fi caper. Still, he and Goldberg retained enough studio goodwill to make their joint directorial debut with 2013's mildly amusing apocalypse comedy This Is the End, only for the following year's political satire The Interview to effectively end their directing careers after the premise of the film, starring Rogen and regular collaborator James Franco as hapless journalists recruited to assassinate Kim Jong-un, attracted the ire of the North Korean government. Sony largely nixed its theatrical release. On screen, meanwhile, Rogen alternated between playing oafishly to type and pushing subtly against it: he was a schlub in Polley's 2012 romantic drama Take This Waltz, but a wounded, tender one, and a gentle foil to Barbra Streisand's overbearing Jewish mother stereotype in The Guilt Trip. As the long-suffering tech entrepreneur Steve Wozniak in Danny Boyle's biopic Steve Jobs, he made a bid for prestige thespian credibility, while even in more tailored comic fare like the hit Neighbors films, he admitted some growth, taking the part of the weary family man to Zac Efron's heedless hedonist. But it was 2019's Long Shot, which returned him to the romantic comedy genre opposite Charlize Theron, that most clearly exemplified the new-model Rogen as he approached 40. As an unemployed journo hired as a speechwriter for Theron's sleek presidential candidate, he was still scruffy, still offbeat, but softly, sweetly so: in contrast to Knocked Up, the film's Pygmalion-style narrative necessitated more change on the man's part than the woman's. And in Steven Spielberg's nostalgic autofiction The Fabelmans he was unimpeachably gentle as one of the most sympathetic homewreckers in all of cinema, seducing Michelle Williams's matriarch with unspoken puppy-dog longing. In person, Rogen has made up for any earlier indiscretions with an unblotted nice-guy reputation: if the public knows little about his 20-year, intentionally child-free relationship with actress and writer Lauren Miller, that's exactly the way he wants it. His only personal relationship to garner any scrutiny is his former friendship with Franco, whose star has fallen in the wake of multiple sexual misconduct allegations — though Rogen once stated his intent to keep working with the embattled actor, he's since cut ties entirely. Asked by a Sunday Times journalist if the estrangement was painful, his answer was guarded: 'Not as painful and difficult as it is for a lot of other people involved. I have no pity for myself in this situation.' In interviews, he prefers to talk about his ceramics hobby and his unflagging weed habit — both of which he's combined into a surprisingly elegant lifestyle brand, Houseplant — and remains proudly outspoken on political matters. His condemnation of Zionism ('I was fed a huge amount of lies about Israel,' he said on a Marc Maron podcast in 2020) has aroused controversy for which he has steadfastly not apologised. For Rogen, niceness needn't equal blandness — just as The Studio, prickly and pointed in all the right places, proves that 'mature' comedy isn't the safer route.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Judd Apatow's unfiltered DGA Awards opening monologue took aim at President Trump, Elon Musk, Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni feud
When Judd Apatow took the stage to host the 77th Annual Directors Guild Awards on Saturday night, he clearly had no fear of President Trump and the new White House administration. The Knocked Up director, who was hosting the event for the sixth time, took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaned into the knock on Hollywood being "super duper woke" and even threw in a joke about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's It Ends With Us drama. "All of the people nominated for Best Director of a film this year are men. So if one of you could change your pronouns tonight, it would really help us out," began Apatow, who later declared his pronouns are "we're f***ed." Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), Edward Berger (Conclave), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) and James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) were the nominees for the big award of the night: Directorial Achievement in Feature Film. "There are some of you in this room who voted for Trump," Apatow said, which actually got a few cheers in the room. "I won't judge you, but God will. ... I'm very depressed. To deal with it, I just started microdosing meth." Apatow's jokes weren't all political. (But yes, a lot were.) When he said how much he loved Wicked, "the highest-grossing musical of all time," he remarked, "usually to make that much money, you have to sue Blake Lively." He joked how this drama was all over "such a terrible movie." That got one of the biggest laughs of the night. Apatow also riffed on how Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis) and Kevin Costner spent their own money on passion projects that bombed at the box office. 'Imagine being Kevin Costner's kids and realizing you don't get a trust fund, but you do get to watch Horizon 1 and 2 whenever you like,' he said. Apatow poked fun at the drama that Baker did not use an intimacy coordinator while making Anora. He said he and wife, Leslie Mann, even use one. "I want to work with a coordinator once a month, but Leslie wants us to work with him three times a week," he told the crowd. The host shifted back to politics and talked about the Step Brothers meme Musk posted on X. The Tesla CEO shared a clip from the film, which Apatow produced, after meeting with Jeff Bezos. It shows Will Ferrell's character asking, "Did we just become best friends?" Step Brothers is the perfect meme for @JeffBezos & me 🤣🤣 — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 16, 2025 "He wrote, 'This is me and Jeff Bezos,'" Apatow said. "I don't think he really understands the premise of that film. It's about two f***ing morons.'" Apatow said he's "one compliment away" from being in Trump's Cabinet. "Maybe I should make TV that MAGA people would like: The Real Housewives of January 6," he said. "Or Extreme Home Makeover: Gaza edition." Apatow joked whether Hollywood should go even more woke and have the next Dune film "with all gay sandworms" or whether the next installment of Spider-Man should be renamed "The Amazing Spider-Person." Apatow then mused about what would happen of Musk's dream comes true and he colonizes Mars. He said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bezos, Brett Kavanaugh and Peter Thiel could all go live on the planet. "We realize we don't miss them. We didn't need cryptocurrency. We don't need AI. One day we look at the sky and we can see the skies. ... MTV starts showing music videos again. Everyone's got flip phones. .... Young men leave their basements and start flirting with girls. ... Kid Rock becomes a Democrat. Britney Spears puts a new record out and puts her father in a conservatorship. ... Jennifer Aniston remarries Brad Pitt." Apatow added, "By leaving Earth, they make America great again." He concluded by saying he was going to head backstage and see how the monologue affected his career. As for the actual show, Anora kept up its newfound momentum one month before the Oscars as Baker won for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film. He also won the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards, which were also held across town on Saturday. The awards are a big indicator for the Oscars Best Director and Best Picture categories.
Yahoo
09-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Judd Apatow's unfiltered DGA Awards opening monologue took aim at President Trump, Elon Musk, Blake Lively-Justin Baldoni feud
When Judd Apatow took the stage to host the 77th Annual Directors Guild Awards on Saturday night, he clearly had no fear of President Trump and the new White House administration. The Knocked Up director, who was hosting the event for the sixth time, took aim at Donald Trump and Elon Musk, leaned into the knock on Hollywood being "super duper woke" and even threw in a joke about Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni's It Ends With Us drama. "All of the people nominated for Best Director of a film this year are men. So if one of you could change your pronouns tonight, it would really help us out," began Apatow, who later declared his pronouns are "we're f***ed." Jacques Audiard (Emilia Pérez), Sean Baker (Anora), Edward Berger (Conclave), Brady Corbet (The Brutalist) and James Mangold (A Complete Unknown) were the nominees for the big award of the night: Directorial Achievement in Feature Film. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. "There are some of you in this room who voted for Trump," Apatow said, which actually got a few cheers in the room. "I won't judge you, but God will. ... I'm very depressed. To deal with it, I just started microdosing meth." Apatow's jokes weren't all political. (But yes, a lot were.) When he said how much he loved Wicked, "the highest-grossing musical of all time," he remarked, "usually to make that much money, you have to sue Blake Lively." He joked how this drama was all over "such a terrible movie." That got one of the biggest laughs of the night. Apatow also riffed on how Francis Ford Coppola (Megalopolis) and Kevin Costner spent their own money on passion projects that bombed at the box office. 'Imagine being Kevin Costner's kids and realizing you don't get a trust fund, but you do get to watch Horizon 1 and 2 whenever you like,' he said. Apatow poked fun at the drama that Baker did not use an intimacy coordinator while making Anora. He said he and wife, Leslie Mann, even use one. "I want to work with a coordinator once a month, but Leslie wants us to work with him three times a week," he told the crowd. The host shifted back to politics and talked about the Step Brothers meme Musk posted on X. The Tesla CEO shared a clip from the film, which Apatow produced, after meeting with Jeff Bezos. It shows Will Ferrell's character asking, "Did we just become best friends?" "He wrote, 'This is me and Jeff Bezos,'" Apatow said. "I don't think he really understands the premise of that film. It's about two f***ing morons.'" Apatow said he's "one compliment away" from being in Trump's Cabinet. "Maybe I should make TV that MAGA people would like: The Real Housewives of January 6," he said. "Or Extreme Home Makeover: Gaza edition." Apatow joked whether Hollywood should go even more woke and have the next Dune film "with all gay sandworms" or whether the next installment of Spider-Man should be renamed "The Amazing Spider-Person." Apatow then mused about what would happen of Musk's dream comes true and he colonizes Mars. He said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Bezos, Brett Kavanaugh and Peter Thiel could all go live on the planet. "We realize we don't miss them. We didn't need cryptocurrency. We don't need AI. One day we look at the sky and we can see the skies. ... MTV starts showing music videos again. Everyone's got flip phones. .... Young men leave their basements and start flirting with girls. ... Kid Rock becomes a Democrat. Britney Spears puts a new record out and puts her father in a conservatorship. ... Jennifer Aniston remarries Brad Pitt." Apatow added, "By leaving Earth, they make America great again." He concluded by saying he was going to head backstage and see how the monologue affected his career. As for the actual show, Anora kept up its newfound momentum one month before the Oscars as Baker won for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film. He also won the top prize at the Producers Guild Awards, which were also held across town on Saturday. The awards are a big indicator for the Oscars Best Director and Best Picture categories.
