(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Tue 23 September 2025 20:15, UK
Whether you like it or not, Seth Rogen‘s laugh has been the soundtrack of big-screen comedy for the past two decades. As the genre’s place in the cinemas continues to sink below the surface, Rogen’s cackle is the desperate foghorn, signalling for help.
But he’s acted as an important bridge for comedy cinema in that period. His writing and movies tried to transition cinema out of its somewhat ethically questionable style of the noughties, to the more indie and obscure. Sure, his storylines often centred the main character’s love for a joint and a cheeseburger, but it started a necessary change from the problematic and misogynistic trends of some of the films that came before.
As the years went on and he grew in success as a filmmaker, comedy films declined in studio priority, but he championed the necessity for film lovers to continue watching comedies in the cinema. Reminding us of the joy that exists when strangers in a room share laughter, he continued to campaign for the role big-budget laughathons play in the artistic eco-system.
With his own movies like This Is the End or The Interview boast the luxury of explosive sequences, he is trying to prove that comedy financing needs to be treated more diversely than thinking, making a good joke is a free concept.
Which is probably why when Rogen was quizzed to reel off some of his favourite comedy films of all time, none of them, bar one, was contemporary: “Ghostbusters is a great comedy. The South Park movie, Team America, There’s Something About Mary, all really very funny. More recently, I think movies like Bridesmaids is super funny. I think every movie I’ve made should be considered one of them.”
Of those five, Ghostbusters is arguably the one that typifies the concept of a big-budget comedy, built for a silver screen roll out. The innovative use of a technology like CGI, used now in the modern landscape, would most likely not be reserved for comedy, and so proves his point that without the funding, a certain style of the genre will one day die out.
But when describing the essence of the film’s success, it still comes back to good storyline, as he says, “I think each of them is different. Ghostbusters, it has a simple structure to it, you know? I think there’s something to be said about a movie that embellishes on something that really isn’t that complicated.”
He added, “It’s like with food: Some people like fancy, frilly meals and then the more good food you eat, you slowly realise that a simple dish, prepared really well, is actually much more satisfying, and, in a way, much harder to accomplish.”
Sadly, the film has become somewhat of an indictment of where the movie industry is currently situated. New voices, stories and ideas are no longer being trusted in the modern filmmaking landscape, and so Ghostbusters has been one of many remade for a current audience. In a desperate bid to lure cinemagoers into theatres, studios have opted for nostalgia porn over originality. Now we can no longer hear Rogen’s laugh cackling above the water. Now, he’s fully submerged with a sunken ship.
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