Lionsgate Motion Picture Vice Chair Adam Fogelson On Theaters Being The Best Place For Comedies With Pics Like ‘Joy Ride’ – CinemaCon
“Nothing in any future I see can replace the communal theatrical experience,” emphasized Lionsgate Motion Picture Vice Chair Adam Fogelson at the top of Lionsgate CinemaCon presentation, which closed out the 2023 Las Vegas confab this afternoon.
“Neither the advent of television or the advent of videotapes or the advent or DVDs or the advent of streaming platforms or a global pandemic can stop that,” he said told the crowd of exhibitors.
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“As long as we do our part to please customers, we can all thrive,” Fogelson said emphasizing the studio’s release strategy for both tentpoles and audience specific movies, “the business can’t thrive on tentpoles alone.”
Fogelson pointed to the novelty of Lionsgate in meeting different demos: This Friday it has the feature take on Judy Blume’s classic novel, Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret aimed at women and girls and the Finnish genre movie Sisu, which is in 1,000 theaters.
Overall, it was a brief session for Lionsgate, the anchors being the first trailer for The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes dropping, and a sneak preview of Adele Lim’s raunchy road comedy, Joy Ride.
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“Anyone who questions whether theaters are the best place for comedies wasn’t at SXSW,” said Fogelson, trumpeting Joy Ride‘s reception there. The film stands at 100% on Rotten Tomatoes off 13 reviews. Read Deadline’s review here.
The Lim-directed raunchy comedy stars Oscar nominee Stephanie Hsu, Sabrina Wu, Ashley Park and Sherry Cola. The pic made its world premiere at SXSW back in March and debuts on July 7.
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Joy Ride follows four unlikely friends who embark on a once-in-a-lifetime international adventure. When Audrey’s (Park) business trip to Asia goes sideways, she enlists the aid of Lolo (Cola), her irreverent childhood best friend who also happens to be a hot mess; Kat (Hsu), her college friend turned Chinese soap star; and Deadeye (Wu), Lolo’s eccentric cousin. Their no-holds-barred, epic experience becomes a journey of bonding, friendship, belonging, and wild debauchery that reveals the universal truth of what it means to know and love who you are.
The cast and director Lim appeared onstage with producer Seth Rogen for a convo with Fogelson.
On why Lim made Joy Ride: “I just worked on Raya and the Last Dragon, a Disney animated movie, and all I wanted to do was tell dick jokes,” she said. “And I’m friends with these two bitches over there, and sometimes we go to dinner, and there’s dick jokes, vag jokes. We haven’t seen women with faces like ours telling dick jokes. Representation is what I’m so proud of.”
Park watched the movie with her parents at SXSW with the Lionsgate execs sitting behind them. Asked how her parents reacted to the R-rated comedy, the actress said, “The next day, my mom at breakfast said, ‘I met the actor who is in the wrestling scene with you.’ My dad said, ‘That’s what we call the ‘sexy time’ scenes.'”
Rogen was attracted to the broad resonance of the comedy, which he found “genuine.” Making movies “that people can relate to, people will laugh at it for decades,” he explained. The actor-scribe-producer, who worked with Fogelson at Universal with The Forty Year-Old Virgin, said that the test screening for Joy Ride, “blew the lid off the theater. You could feel the audience in the room going, ‘thank f*cking God that a group of people attempted to do this again.” Meaning, a feature theatrical comedy.
Lionsgate’s slate for 2023 includes About My Father (May 26), The Blackening (June 16), Joy Ride (July 7), White Bird: A Wonder Story (August 18), The Expendables 4 (September 22), Ordinary Angels (October 13), a Saw sequel (October 27) and The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes (November 17).
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