Can Big-Screen Comedy Survive The Superhero Era?

Days before the opening of the Will Ferrell- Amy Poehler comedy “The House,” producer Adam McKay could see the writing on the wall. The box-office forecast for the film wasn’t looking good.

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In the end, “The House” opened with just $8.7 million, the latest in an increasingly long line of comedy flops. “The House” may have had its problems (Warner Bros. opted to not even screen it for critics) but what stood out about the result was how dispiritingly typical it was.

“This has just been happening a lot. If it’s not our comedies, it’s other comedies from friends of ours that just are underperforming very consistently,” said McKay, whose production company with Ferrell makes a handful of comedies a year.

Unless the upcoming “Girls Trip” - promoted as the black, female version of “The Hangover” - breaks out, this summer will likely pass without a big comedy hit. “Rough Night,” ‘’Baywatch” and “Snatched” have all disappointed despite the star power of Scarlett Johansson, Dwayne Johnson and Amy Schumer, respectively. The lone sensation has been the Kumail Nanjianiled, Judd Apatow produced “The Big Sick.” But that Lionsgate-Amazon release is a specialty one; it’s made $6.8 million in three weeks of limited release.

Laughs are drying up at the multiplex, and it’s a trend that goes beyond this summer. Last year, the shockingly poor performance of Andy Samberg’s “Popstar” ($9.6 million in its entire run) foreshadowed the trouble to come. There have been some successes (“Bad Moms,” ‘’Sausage Party,” ‘’Trainwreck,” ‘’Central Intelligence,” ‘’Spy,”) but it’s been a long while since a cultural sensation like “The 40 Year-Old Virgin,” ‘’The Hangover” or “Bridesmaids.”