Wet Hot American Summer Made $295,000 in Theaters. It's Better Than You Think
Critics trashed David Wain's 2001 summer camp spoof and almost nobody paid to see it. Netflix later paid to make more of it, which tells you who was right.
By the Heckle Desk · · 3 min read
In the summer of 2001, a little movie called Wet Hot American Summer went into theaters and took in about $295,000 at the domestic box office. That's not the opening weekend. That's the whole run. To put it in perspective, a moderately successful car wash will out-earn that in a good year, and the car wash doesn't have Paul Rudd.
The critics, meanwhile, were not kind. Most reviews were negative, and the film's Rotten Tomatoes score has hovered somewhere in the thirties depending on when you check, which is the score you'd give a sandwich you found in a glovebox. The budget was small, around $1.8 million by most accounts, and it looked it, the way a camp counselor looks like he's wearing the same shirt as yesterday because he is.
Here's the plot. It's the last day of camp, 1981, at a place called Camp Firewood. David Wain directed it, he and Michael Showalter wrote it, and the counselors are all played by people who were obviously too old to be counselors, which is the joke, and also, if you've been to summer camp, the documentary part. Janeane Garofalo runs the place. David Hyde Pierce is an astrophysicist worried about falling space debris. Christopher Meloni plays a cook who takes advice from a talking can of vegetables. I want to stress that this is not a dream sequence. The can just talks, and everyone accepts it, the way you accept a relative's politics at Thanksgiving.
Now look at that cast again with today's eyes. Paul Rudd. Amy Poehler. Elizabeth Banks. Molly Shannon. And, in his first movie role, a young Bradley Cooper, who would later be nominated for so many Academy Awards that the Academy should start charging him rent. In 2001 these people couldn't sell $300,000 worth of tickets. A few years later, any one of them could open a movie by themselves. The film didn't fail because it was bad. It failed because it was early, and in show business those two have the same funeral.
The proof came slowly, then all at once. The movie found its audience on home video, in dorm rooms and on cable at two in the morning, which is the natural habitat of a cult comedy. By 2015, Netflix brought nearly the whole cast back for an eight-episode prequel, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, and then ordered a sequel series after that. Think about the economics. The same industry that let this thing die in theaters paid real money to resurrect it fourteen years later, and the actors, now famous and expensive, came back anyway. Nobody goes back to camp at forty unless they had a good time there.
Is it a perfect movie? No. It wanders. Some jokes are a bit that goes on until it turns into a different bit, and then a third bit, and then you realize the movie has forgotten it had a plot and so have you. But that's the point. It's a parody of those '80s camp movies that were mostly an excuse to show teenagers kissing by a lake, and it understands, better than its critics did, that those movies never had a plot either.
Critics are paid to tell you what's good this week. Time is paid nothing at all, and it's a much better judge. The trouble with being ahead of your time is that you have to wait around for everybody else, and by then they've forgotten they ever laughed at you.