Despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, Judd Apatow wasn’t responsible for every single broad studio comedy to arrive during the first two decades of this century. However, plenty of his collaborators lent their names to The Watch, so there were at least plenty of reasons to be optimistic.
Given the sheer level of talent involved in the 2012 hybrid of sci-fi and gross-out, it probably would have been a whole lot harder to create something terrible, but that’s exactly what we got. The Watch landed a meager 16% score on Rotten Tomatoes to go down as one of the worst-reviewed Hollywood comedies in a long time, while it flopped at the box office after barely recouping the $68 million budget.
There was no shortage of potential in the premise, either, with a quartet of friends taking their neighborhood watch duties a touch too seriously, before they get much more than they bargained for when they uncover a full-blown alien invasion happening in their midst.
Even though it sucked 10 years ago and it still sucks now, The Watch has nonetheless convinced Prime Video subscribers on both sides of the Atlantic that it’s an unmissable motion picture event, with FlixPatrol naming the dismal dud as a Top 10 hit on both the British and American charts.
Directed by The Lonely Island’s Akiva Schaffer, co-written by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, produced by Shawn Levy, and starring Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill, Richard Ayoade, Rosemarie DeWitt, and Doug Jones buried under prosthetics as usual, it boggles the mind to think how badly The Watch bungled absolutely everything looking at those names and their respective comedic accomplishments.