Matt Tolmach

The Sony exec turned Rough Night producer on Hollywood’s dilemma: ‘Audiences want what feels familiar, but they don’t want it to be familiar’

- Tatiana Siegel

As a Beloit College under-grad, Matt Tolmach received an alarmed call from his grandfather, legendary Hollywood producer and agent Sam Jaffe, who once represented the likes of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and also produced Born Free. “He said, ‘Matthew, what’s this crap I hear about you being a writer? Come on out to the coast, and I’ll get you a job at the Morris office,’ ” recalls Tolmach, 52. And so Tolmach did, embarking on a Hollywood career in 1986 from the William Morris mailroom. He eventually rose to be co-president of Sony’s Columbia Pictures and during his 13 years at the studio helped solidify its standing as a go-to destination for bawdy comedies, shepherding Superbad, Pineapple Express and Talladega Nights. Though it has been seven years since he left the top post, he never strayed from Culver City, setting up a Sony-based production company and tackling the last two SpiderMan movies. But 2017 marks his busiest year yet, with two movies for the hit-starved studio: the Scarlett Johansson starrer Rough Night, opening June 16, and the Dwayne Johnson-Kevin Hart pairing Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle on Dec. 20. In addition, he’s an executive producer on the Hulu series Future Man (with longtime collaborators Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg), and his Spider-Man spinoff Venom just landed Tom Hardy as the lead and Ruben Fleischer to direct. The married father of a 10-year-old son sat down with THR at his offices on the Sony lot to discuss his banner year.

Rough Night is a hard R. Was there any pushback from the studio?