Popstar Made $9.6 Million on a $20 Million Budget. It's Better Than You Think

In June 2016, Universal released Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a mockumentary starring Andy Samberg as Conner4Real, a pop singer with the self-awareness of a decorative fountain. It was directed by Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone, Samberg's partners in the Lonely Island, and it cost around $20 million. It opened in eighth place with about $4.6 million and finished its domestic run with roughly $9.6 million. In Hollywood, that's not a flop so much as a disappearance. People looked for it the way you look for a sock in the dryer, briefly and without hope.

The strange thing is that the critics liked it. Popstar's reviews were the best of anything opening that weekend. It simply didn't matter, because the audience it was made for was busy watching the very pop stars it was making fun of, which is a bit like opening a temperance bar next to the brewery.

So here is the case. Start with the songs, because the songs are the whole trick. The Lonely Island spent years at Saturday Night Live writing digital shorts that sounded exactly like real hits and meant exactly the opposite, and Popstar is that skill at feature length. There's a song in which Conner brags about how humble he is, and another in which he supports gay marriage while reminding everyone, every few bars, that he personally is not gay. That one is the most accurate description of a celebrity's politics ever set to a beat.

Then there are the cameos. The film is shot like a real music documentary, with real musicians talking straight to the camera about Conner as though he matters. Questlove, Mariah Carey, Usher and Ringo Starr all show up and keep a straight face, which must have been harder than any of their concerts. It's the oldest joke in the format, getting famous people to vouch for a fool, and the oldest jokes last because fools do too.

It also predicted things. Popstar mocks the pop star with an entourage whose only job is to agree with him, the album pushed onto people who never asked for it, and the publicity stunt that goes wrong in public. Ten years later, that's not satire, that's a calendar. Watching it now is like reading a weather report written a decade early and discovering it was right about the hail.

None of this sold tickets, and I can't pretend it did. Comedy movies were already sliding toward streaming in 2016, and a mockumentary about a pop star is a hard sell to people who can't tell the difference between the joke and the original. That's not the movie's fault. When the real thing becomes indistinguishable from the parody, the parody loses, and the real thing goes on tour.

Samberg, Schaffer and Taccone survived it, as people do. Schaffer went on to direct the new Naked Gun, so somebody in Hollywood was paying attention. Popstar, meanwhile, sits on streaming services waiting to be found, like a good bottle at the back of a cupboard in a house where everybody drinks beer.

Here is the moral. A man who makes fun of the emperor's new clothes will be thanked eventually, but usually not while the emperor is still selling out arenas.