Eight comedies opened in U.S. theaters last year. Forty-five horror films did. Adam Shankman, the director behind The Wedding Planner, Hairspray and Bringing Down the House, surfaced that ratio in a Newsweek interview tied to Stop! That! Train!, his RuPaul-led action-disaster spoof that opens June 12 from independent distributor Bleecker Street.
The film carries a Fandango tie-in granting three free months of WOW Presents Plus (World of Wonder’s streaming service) to ticket buyers, a textbook indie push to coax audiences back into a screening room many have learned, slowly, to skip. Shankman’s argument runs deeper than nostalgia for a lost format. He thinks the genre has been quietly relocated to the living room, and he wants people to notice on opening weekend.
The Train Pulls Out of the Station on June 12
Stop! That! Train! lands in U.S. theaters on June 12, after a world premiere at LGBTQ+ film festival Newfest on May 28. Bleecker Street holds North American rights; Universal Pictures handles international distribution. The New York indie founded in 2014 has built its 2026 slate around director-led swings: Mike Leigh’s next picture, Rob Reiner’s Spinal Tap at Stonehenge concert film, Alex Gibney’s Musk documentary, and now Shankman’s drag-led disaster spoof.
The movie runs a tight 92 minutes, co-produced by World of Wonder (the studio behind RuPaul’s Drag Race) and Shankman’s own Unapologetic Projects. Christina Friel and Connor Wright wrote the script. Ginger Minj and Jujubee play train stewardesses bumped from the dingy “Stank Rail” to the glittering “Glamazonian Express,” then conscripted to save the high-speed train from a catastrophic storm called the “Stormagaza” alongside the snobby first-class crew (Brooke Lynn Hytes, Marcia Marcia Marcia, Symone) and President Judy Gagwell (RuPaul).
The Fandango promotion bundles a theater ticket with a quarter-year of WOW Presents Plus, a tie-in built to convert opening-weekend curiosity into a streaming subscription. For an indie picture without a tentpole’s marketing spend, that bundle is, in practice, the marketing campaign. The production also collected $1.7 million in California tax incentives in March 2025 before cameras rolled the following September, the kind of state support that increasingly determines which mid-budget pictures get made at all.
Eight Comedies, Forty-Five Horror Films
The number Shankman tossed out in his Newsweek interview is the spine of his pitch. Forty-five horror films released theatrically against eight live-action comedies in the prior year is the kind of ratio that explains why a director with a $200 million Hairspray on his shelf is talking about why theatrical comedy still matters at all. He has a vested interest, obviously. He also has the data.
The decline is older than the pandemic. According to a Stat Significant analysis of Letterboxd genre prevalence, comedy’s share of theatrical filmmaking has dropped sharply over the past decade, a fall surpassed only by the long-dead western. The last year U.S. theatrical comedies grossed more than $2 billion domestically was 2011. In 2024, once Beetlejuice Beetlejuice and Kung Fu Panda 4 were excluded, the entire genre took in roughly $397 million at the domestic box office.
Melissa McCarthy would not have gotten her Oscar nomination for Bridesmaids if it came out today, because it would go straight to streaming. It’s not right.
That is Shankman, naming the picture (2011’s Bridesmaids, $306 million worldwide on a $32.5 million budget) that earned McCarthy a Best Supporting Actress nod at the 84th Academy Awards. The economic logic that produced that outcome has been undone. Major studios shed mid-budget comedies first when streamers started paying $20-$60 million for finished features, because comedies travel poorly overseas, rarely seed a franchise, and have shorter shelf life on subsequent rewatches than action or genre fare.
How Shankman Directed a Soap Opera in Drag
Shankman’s creative instruction on set was the opposite of broad. He told the cast they were not in a comedy. The peril of the Stormagaza was real. The stakes were soap-opera high. The jokes would land precisely because no one was reaching for them.
“It hearkens to a kind of comedy that was extremely formative for me,” Shankman told Newsweek. “It is stupid as hell, and unapologetically so.” His named touchstones were Mel Brooks and the Leslie Nielsen Naked Gun films, deadpan disaster parodies built on actors playing it absolutely straight.
The picture shot in 19 days, a brutal schedule that demanded a cast capable of arriving prepared and a script that had already been workshopped to within an inch of its life. Writers Christina Friel and Connor Wright, both of whom built their reputations in queer-adjacent comedy, delivered a screenplay Shankman has described as needing few studio notes, partly because there was no studio in the conventional sense to deliver them. World of Wonder produced; Bleecker Street acquired; the director set the tone.
Shankman’s instruction to play it real also served a defensive function. He told Newsweek that recent theatrical comedies often carry “a self-consciousness” born of dancing around audience tastes, a carefulness about how a joke is delivered that he believes neuters the joke itself. Asking RuPaul, Ginger Minj and Jujubee to act like the train crash is genuinely killing them is, in that frame, an act of comedic discipline.
A Cameo Roster Built in Half-Hour Slots
The supporting cast is what an action-comedy spoof actually runs on, and Shankman described slotting in famous faces in tight windows: Sarah Michelle Gellar in roughly thirty seconds of phone selling, Joel McHale in and out inside half an hour, Missi Pyle game for whatever physical bit landed in her trailer, Nicole Richie walking onto set already in character before being briefed.
The cameo bench announced for the film reads like a working television comedian’s contact list:
- Sarah Michelle Gellar, the Buffy the Vampire Slayer lead
- Lisa Rinna, the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills alum
- Jesse Tyler Ferguson, the Modern Family Emmy nominee
- Missi Pyle, the Galaxy Quest and Dodgeball veteran
- Nicole Richie, the actress and producer
- Joel McHale, the Community lead
- Raven-Symoné, the That’s So Raven star
- Charo, the longtime variety television performer
- Chris Parnell and Natasha Leggero, both comedy regulars from Adult Swim and stand-up circuits
That ensemble layout, dense with sub-five-minute roles, is the modern indie answer to the bench the old studio comedy used to staff in-house. It is also the kind of casting Bleecker Street can sell as a thumbnail mosaic on a Fandango landing page, which is roughly how trailers are sold to scrolling phones in 2026. A similar all-hands-on-deck strategy was visible in last cycle’s indie comedy Reunion, the John W. Kim Cinequest premiere that toured festivals before a regional rollout, evidence that low-budget comedy still functions as a launchpad when the room is right.
What the Naked Gun Reboot Already Showed
The strongest evidence for Shankman’s wager sits on Paramount’s books. The 2025 Naked Gun reboot, starring Liam Neeson and directed by Akiva Schaffer with Seth MacFarlane producing, opened in August to an 88% Rotten Tomatoes score and grossed roughly $102 million globally against a $42 million production budget. That was enough to make it the third-highest-grossing live-action theatrical comedy of 2025, behind Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy ($140.1 million) and Materialists ($65 million).
The picture worked on a recipe Shankman would recognize. Neeson, an actor with two decades of deadpan action gravitas, played Frank Drebin Jr. as straight as Leslie Nielsen ever played the senior. The marketing carried a single sustained tone. The runtime stayed inside ninety minutes. The genre identity was unambiguous in every poster and trailer.
| Live-action theatrical comedy (2025) | Box office | Production budget | Format |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy | $140.1M global | Not disclosed | Studio franchise sequel |
| The Naked Gun | $102M global | $42M | Franchise revival |
| Materialists | $65M domestic | Not disclosed | A24 original |
| One of Them Days | ~$52M domestic | $14M | Sony original |
The shared profile across those four titles is instructive. Each opened with a clear comedy identity, each ran short, three of the four cost well under $50 million to produce, and each found enough room in a quiet weekend to bank an audience. Bleecker Street is building a release for Stop! That! Train! that matches the playbook beat for beat: a June slot light on mid-budget comedy competition, a 92-minute runtime, and a budget the distributor has not disclosed but which the 19-day shoot and California incentive package suggest sits well below the Naked Gun line.
What that comparison cannot solve for is reach. Bridget Jones had decades of brand equity, The Naked Gun had a Liam Neeson trailer that played in every multiplex for two months. An indie disaster spoof anchored by drag performers from a cable franchise will need its Fandango deal and its early-screening word of mouth to do work the studio system would normally do via paid television.
The Room Tone Hollywood Forgot
What the director keeps returning to is the room. He told Newsweek the part of release week he genuinely enjoys is sitting in an auditorium listening to other people laugh, an experience he says audiences “don’t have enough of anymore.” His pitch is acoustic, built around the sound a packed theater makes when a joke lands and three hundred people exhale at the same time. A horror film’s jump scare still functions in a living room. A comedy beat shrinks there.
A single indie picture will not, by itself, reset the genre’s economics. What it can do is what the Naked Gun reboot did last August, which is prove that a comedy aimed at a specific room can still fill a few rows of it. On the morning of June 12, a few hundred screens across the country will dim their lights for a 92-minute disaster spoof starring a drag-show president and a runaway high-speed train. Whether the people in those rooms laugh together or alone is the only metric that matters now.
