Wet Hot American Summer Made $292,000 and Got a 39%. It Was a Masterpiece Anyway
In 2001, critics hated it, theaters barely played it, and Roger Ebert panned it in verse. Then the cast became famous, and the joke turned out to be on everybody else.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
In the summer of 2001, a movie called Wet Hot American Summer came out, more or less. It played in so few theaters that it made about $292,000 at the domestic box office, which in Hollywood terms is what you'd call a rounding error, or a catering bill. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 39 percent. Roger Ebert disliked it so much that he wrote his review in verse, which is the critical equivalent of a man so angry he starts speaking in rhyme.
Now, I don't hold any of that against the critics. A critic is paid to watch a movie once, and some movies need to be watched four times before you realize they were right the whole time. This is one of those movies. I've watched it more than four times. I'm not proud of it, but I'm not ashamed either. I'm just tired.
Directed by David Wain, who wrote it with Michael Showalter, the film takes place on the last day of a summer camp in 1981. That's all you need to know about the plot, because the plot doesn't need to know much about itself. Scenes swerve into total absurdity without warning. A talking can of vegetables gives advice. Nobody acts like this is strange, and that's the secret. The film plays its nonsense with a perfectly straight face, the way a good liar tells a story at a funeral.
And look who's in it. Paul Rudd, Bradley Cooper, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Janeane Garofalo, Molly Shannon, David Hyde Pierce, Christopher Meloni. At the time, most of them were simply employed. Within a few years, half of them were movie stars, and the movie that nobody saw became the movie everybody pretended they'd seen first.
The public did the rest, the way the public does. It found the film on home video and passed it along, like a rumor or a cold. Netflix eventually brought the whole gang back for two series, in 2015 and 2017, which is what happens when a flop gets popular enough. It gets a sequel. Then a prequel. Then everyone says they loved it all along.
In fairness to the other side: if you don't laugh in the first ten minutes, nothing later will change your mind, and you should go do something worthwhile with your evening. But a 39 percent movie that people still quote twenty-five years later isn't a failure. It's a summer camp. You didn't like it at the time, either. Now you can't stop talking about it.