Comedy succeeds almost entirely on the strength of the writing and the performances of the cast, so it’s never been regarded as a genre that’s particularly expensive to produce. The highest-budgeted effort in history is still Steve Carell’s infamous Evan Almighty, with the studio thinking it’d be a good move to make a $175 million sequel to Jim Carrey’s most successful film without Jim Carrey, and it failed to even recoup those astronomical costs at the box office.
The second and third costliest comedies ever made, meanwhile, hail from Happy Madison Productions and star Adam Sandler in the lead role, with the video game-inspired Pixels setting Sony back a reported $130 million, while You Don’t Mess with the Zohan surprisingly came armed with a budget of $90 million.
For the most part, though, Sandler’s vehicles tend to operate in roughly the same budgetary ballpark, which is typically somewhere between the $40 million to $80 million range. However, insider Daniel Richtman claims that the actor now wants more funds for his upcoming slate of Netflix projects, although the tipster doesn’t offer any clue as to why he needs the money or what he’s planning to spend it on.
It’s hard to imagine a reason why Adam Sandler would require $100 million to make a Netflix comedy when all of his efforts so far have been relatively contained, with the exception of the globetrotting Murder Mystery, and even then the streaming smash hit was only said to have set the company back by a relatively thrifty $24 million. The 54 year-old can pretty much do whatever he wants under Happy Madison’s lucrative deal with the platform, but he’d need a hell of a pitch to justify such a large investment.
