‘Naked Gun’ Producers Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins Talk Greenlight Hurdles and Sequel Possibilities

The Naked Gun has been held up as a bellwether for the viability of studio comedies in the post-pandemic era, and this past weekend, the comedy reboot proved its staying power. The feature, directed by Akiva Schaffer and starring Liam Neeson, dropped just 50 percent in its sophomore outing, bringing its domestic total to $33 million, and its global haul to $56.4 million.

Producers Seth MacFarlane and Erica Huggins hope The Naked Gun is the first of a new wave of comedies that will find theatrical audiences.

Outside of Naked Gun, MacFarlane and Huggins-headed Fuzzy Door has a varied slate that runs the gamut from a Peacock series based on the late ’80s horror-comedy The Burbs to a doc on Carl Sagan to MacFarlane’s Frank Sinatra tribute album Lush Life: The Lost Sinatra. MacFarlane says, “To put it this way: You can make spark plugs and breakfast cereals at the same time, and if there’s a market for both, then why not?”

MacFarlane and Huggins talk to THR about the “double-edged sword” of testing comedies, what lessons Hollywood should take from Naked Gun’s performance, and sequel plans.

What has the response been to Naked Gun’s performance?

ERICA HUGGINS I’ve gotten so many incoming calls and texts and emails from well-wishers, and that doesn’t always happen. (Laughs.) For the first time, you can feel the goodwill from every single producer, all the agencies, from actors, from people who just want comedy.

SETH MACFARLANE I just got a text from a retired Family Guy writer, which tells you how long the show has been on the air. “A retired Family Guy writer.” He said he was at a barber shop at Amherst, Massachusetts. It’s a six-chair place, and everybody was talking about The Naked Gun.

If that isn’t a glowing review, I don’t know what is. What was the biggest hurdle to get the greenlight on this movie?

HUGGINS The biggest thing to overcome was the question: “Will a movie like this — a spoof movie, that we haven’t seen in at least a decade — work for today’s audience?” Then, the next question always became, “Who is the audience? Is it nostalgia only? Is it the older crowd? How do we get the younger crowd?” And then it always came back to budget. The other big part to overcome was that we needed dramatic actors to play the comedy, and play it straight.

How did you convince the studio that Liam Neeson was the right choice?

MACFARLANE I don’t know that we ever did. Eventually, they just got tired of us. There have been other iterations of this franchise attempted over the years and oftentimes it is a comedian, and usually a terrific comedian, who is announced as the lead. One of the fundamental edicts of the [original Naked Gun creators] Zucker Brothers was you played against the comedy. You cast people like Robert Stack, Peter Graves and Leslie Nielsen. There were no comics, and it just worked every single time when they stuck to that.

In the opening weekend exit numbers, nearly half the audience was in the 18 to 34 demo. What do you make of that?

HUGGINS All the previous Naked Guns were PG-13. Akiva was extremely aware of what that did for him as a kid. It allowed him access, even though it was still a little bit risqué.

MACFARLANE Younger audiences don’t really have the same comedy filmography attached to their experience of growing up as we did. We had movies like Planes, Trains and Automobiles and Caddyshack. In the ’90s, they had comedies like Home Alone and in the early 2000s 40-Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up. It’s been a while since a generation has had a comedy or series of comedies that define their decade.

The marketing for this movie leaned into the reality that there haven’t been broad comedies in theaters. Why do you think that played well?

MACFARLANE It was an easy choice for the studio to just dive into, because there has not been a true, hard comedy in a long time. In the ’80s, you had shows like Cheers that were comedies. They had jokes, they had laughs, they were true comedies that would also be recognized during award season. You don’t see that anymore. [Today] you see essentially dramas with a smattering of jokes in comedy categories. I think it was pretty easy for the studio to take that reality and say, “Hey, we know what you’re looking for. Here’s some water in the desert.”

How important is audience testing when it comes to releasing a comedy for modern audiences?

MACFARLANE Testing is such a double-edged sword. It is hugely valuable in the same way that it’s hugely valuable to workshop your stand-up set, to know what jokes work and what don’t, and to take different parts of the country and see how different audiences react. The only downside is some of the stuff that sticks in the long run, that’s the stuff that’s a little weirder, so it doesn’t really land right away.

HUGGINS The things that audiences love the most and hate the most are the things that are most talked about, too. You have to be careful about not just cutting it off because you get a couple of cards that say it offends people. You want to try and find a balance.

The narrative for comedies and movie musicals is that these two genres have to constantly prove themselves every time they go into a theater.

MACFARLANE It sure is!

Heading into opening weekend, did you feel that pressure?

HUGGINS The question was, “Will a comedy work in the theaters?” Because they are so easy to access on Netflix. All the comedies now seem to be accumulating on streaming, and so it’s just a different experience from laughing in a crowd. I think [it’s about] re-teaching audiences to buy a ticket and go to a packed theater and see a funny movie.

MACFARLANE All the great comedies that we look at as sort of these benchmark moments in our culture and in our own lives, they’re all theatrical. I can’t really think of a single streaming comedy that has that kind of collective hold on the zeitgeist. Maybe they’re out there and I don’t know them. Streaming comedies, some of them, of course, being very good, just kind of come and go. There’s a tendency to think of the theater as something that’s on its way out, but I really think that’s a mistake.

What lessons do you want Hollywood to take away from the performance of Naked Gun?

MACFARLANE Take risks. Make movies that aren’t just reboots — wait a second. The lesson is that people want something that’s outside the usual fare. We’re just so deluged with superhero movies at this point that. It’s like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day, when he wakes up on that last morning, says, “Anything different is good.” People want a little more variety on their plate.

Fuzzy Door has a varied slate — from a Peacock series based on The Burbs to a doc on Carl Sagan — what are studios and streamers saying they are buying right now?

HUGGINS I haven’t seen a lot of interest in buying a hard comedy. It’s harder to understand what that is if you haven’t done it. People want something that feels original, and then in the same breath, they want something that everybody already loves. It’s about good material, regardless of the genre. We’re betting on our taste.

MACFARLANE Taste is everything. There’s so much examining of marketing data, which, if it was worth a damn, every movie and TV show would be a huge hit. You look at somebody like Dana Walden, who just has really good taste and just continues to succeed and succeed and succeed. At the end of the day, you have this thing called a brain, and if you’re running a production company or a studio it is incumbent on you to use that brain and make decisions based on things that you think are of quality or not, marketing data be damned. People don’t want a genre until they do.

Have there been talks about a Naked Gun sequel?

HUGGINS Absolutely. We’ve now had enough conversations among the filmmakers, and certainly with Pam [Anderson] and Liam, too, when we were selling the movie in the blue sky version of what could happen next, yes, we were thinking about where it could go and what it could be. Akiva and Dan and Doug, our writers, we’re all talking about it.