Actor Ben Stiller expressed his shock at how badly “Zoolander 2” performed at the box office following its release in 2016 despite the original film’s success in 2001.
The 58-year-old star discussed his thoughts during a recent episode of David Duchovny’s “Fail Better” podcast. “I thought everybody wanted this,” Stiller said of making the sequel. “And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really f***ed this up. Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews.”
“It really freaked me out because I was like, ‘I didn’t know, was that bad?’ What scared me the most on that one was I’m losing what I think what’s funny, the questioning yourself … on ‘Zoolander 2,’ it was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time.”
Stiller directed, wrote, produced, and starred in the sequel, just as he did with the original. The first “Zoolander” was a critical and commercial success. The movie satirized the fashion industry as it documented the life of a male model, Derek Zoolander (Stiller), and his rival Hansel (Owen Wilson). It earned $60.8 million against a production budget of $28 million.
The sequel fared much worse. Set ten years after the original, “Zoolander 2” included many of the original cast members, including Stiller and Wilson, while Will Ferrell, Penelope Cruz, Kristen Wiig, Naomi Campbell, and Justin Bieber were also co-stars. Benedict Cumberbatch played a transgender model named AII.
As The Guardian noted, “Zoolander 2” barely broke even on its $50 million production budget and received terrible reviews.
Stiller told Duchovny that the failure became a learning experience for him.
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“The wonderful thing that came out of that for me was just having space where, if that had been a hit, and they said ‘Make Zoolander 3 right now,’ or offered some other movie, I would have just probably jumped in and done that,” the “Meet the Parents” star said.
“But I had this space to kind of sit with myself and have to deal with it and other projects that I had been working on – not comedies, some of them – I have the time to actually just work on and develop. Even if somebody said, ‘Well, why don’t you go do another comedy or do this?’ I probably could have figured out something to do. But I just didn’t want to,” Stiller continued.