Throughout the 2000s, Will Ferrell and Adam McKay were viewed as two titans of Hollywood studio comedy, collaborating on a vast number of projects that found a lot of love with critics and audiences, as well as healthy box office returns.
The duo formed production company Gary Sanchez in 2006, two years after Anchorman had shot them to mainstream attention, and the hits kept coming. McKay directed Ferrell in Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, Step Brothers and The Other Guys, while he took story credits and produced The Campaign and Get Hard.
Gary Sanchez also backed a myriad of other titles, many of which didn’t feature Ferrell on camera, a list that encompasses Bachelorette, Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters, Daddy’s Home and its sequel, The Boss, and many more.
However, they dissolved their creative partnership in 2019, with freshly-minted awards season favorite McKay forming Hyperobject Industries, with Ferrell merging Gary Sanchez into offshoot Gloria Sanchez. In a new profile in The Hollywood Reporter, the comic actor explains why they went their separate ways.
“Adam was like, ‘I want to do this, and this, and this’; he wanted growth and a sphere of influence, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know, that sounds like a lot that I have to keep track of.’ To me, the potential of seeing a billboard, and being like: ‘Oh, we’re producing that?’ I don’t know. … At the end of the day, we just have different amounts of bandwidth.”
Ferrell has continued to adhere to the shtick that first made his name two decades ago, while McKay is expected to be back in the awards race with Netflix’s star-studded Don’t Look Up, so they clearly had very different priorities over where they wanted their careers to head.
