The bad reviews that devastated Seth Rogen: “People just kind of hated it”
Seth Rogen has spent the past three decades jumping from one kind of success to another, from his beginnings in stoner flicks and buddy comedies to his recent turn as director for The Studio, and he even has a successful ceramics business.
But none of this means that the multi-hyphenate is immune to criticism, or failure, for that matter. There was a time when it seemed that Rogen’s career was destined to go the way of many comedians, as he moved from films like Pineapple Express and Knocked Up to The Interview and This is the End. Luckily, he managed to pull himself back out of the hole, but not without a few dings to his ego.
“For [The] Green Hornet, the reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad,” Rogen explained on the Diary of a CEO podcast, “People just kind of hated it. It seemed like a thing people were taking joy in disliking a lot.” While a few of Rogen’s films have had mixed reviews, none were as critically panned as his turn as the superhero Green Hornet in 2011.
Not only did he star in the titular role, but he also co-wrote the screenplay with longtime collaborator Evan Goldberg. After the cult status of the 1960s TV show, starring none other than Bruce Lee, and a lengthy development time, audiences and fans had high hopes for the 2011 adaptation.
To their dismay, it ended up being a mumbling, directionless and bloated mix of a superhero film and a Seth Rogen buddy comedy, and critics were quick to pick it apart, as they are wont to do, which has added him to the line of celebrities and artists who are trying to flip the script on their critics—like Charli XCX in her “The don’t build statues of critics” tee.
“I think if most critics knew how much it hurt the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second-guess the way they write these things,” he told Steven Bartlett, adding, “It’s devastating. I know people who never recover from it honestly, years, decades of being hurt. It’s very personal.”
We all struggle with criticism; it’s never pleasant being told that what you’ve worked on for months, maybe years of your life, just isn’t that good, so I sympathise. But what Rogen claims is “personal expression” being criticised on an industrial level, I’d actually say, for him, is a multi-million dollar money maker for the industry.
It’s not like The Green Hornet was a personal piece of poetry or a ceramic carefully thrown by hand, or even a passion project. Just as much of what these industry titans who are quick to disparage critics isn’t exactly high, personal art. Given the kind of money that swirls around film and pop album productions, it’s only right that people get to criticise them. After all, isn’t that the contract you’re entering into when you start making such public-facing ‘art’?
Sure, criticism can hurt. But without it, what standards would we have for art? How would we know that we’ve achieved what we intended with the piece? Would we even really know what art is? Yes, art is creation, and all artful creation is good and should be encouraged regardless of the outcome or audience. But once again, Hollywood films are not simply art. They are money-making machines. So, if they take so many resources to make, then we should be allowed a say in that.
Sometimes it seems as though actors and musicians only value criticism when it’s in their favour, and that’s how we end up with terrible, homogenised and soulless art. And Rogen’s final response to his critics proves my point for me. “It opened to like $35million, which was the biggest opening weekend I’d ever been associated with at that point,” he conceded, evidence that much of the time, the only thing in this industry’s pursuit of art is money-mindedness.
