“I thought everyone wanted this.”

Philip Antonello/Paramount Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection

Ben Stiller talks about the box office returns of Zoolander 2 when it debuted, saying he was “shocked” by the results.

Stiller directed the action-comedy sequel, which he co-wrote alongside Justin Theroux, Nick Stoller, and John Hamburg. It was released in 2016 and opened with $15.9 million over Valentine's Day weekend. The film grossed $29 million domestically on a $50 million budget.

“I thought everyone wanted this,” Stiller said on David Duchovny's radio show. Better fail (via the people). “Then it's like, 'Wow, I must have really messed this up.' Not everyone went to it. And it got these terrible reviews.

“It really scared me because I was like, 'I didn't know it was this bad?'” he continued. What scares me the most about this is that I'm missing out on what I think is funny, which is questioning yourself… Zoolander 2That was definitely shocking to me. It certainly affected me for a long time.

Zoolander 2 compete with dead poolwhich dominated the box office in its first weekend with $152.2 million. How to be single It also dropped the same weekend and topped Stiller's Movie, earning $19.9 million over the same four-day period.

The results of Zoolander 2 led Stiller to reinvent himself and think about other ideas, which eventually led to… Escape from Dannemora And to cut.

“The great thing that came out of that for me was just creating a space where, if that were a big hit, and they said ‘make Zoolander 3 now’ or they pitched another movie, I would probably step in and do it.” He said. “But I had that space to sit with myself and deal with it and the other projects I was working on — not the comedies, some of them — and have time to work on them and develop them.”

“Even if someone had said, 'Well, why don't you go do another comedy or do this?'” Maybe I could have figured out something to do. “But I didn't want to,” he added. “I was just hurt. When you find yourself in terms of what you want to be and do creatively, I've always loved directing. I've always loved making films. I've always loved, in my opinion, the idea of ​​directing films since I was a kid, not necessarily comedies. And so, over the course of about nine or ten months, I was able to develop this limited series.