Wedding Crashers and a Lost World When Comedies Ruled Our Culture

Wedding Crashers just turned 20. That seems hard to believe because of how relatively recent the movie might feel to anyone who was at least in high or secondary school in 2005. Yet unto itself, the movie has long since transformed into a relic of a bygone age.

In one sense, the humor of the Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson-starring Wedding Crashers is hopelessly, even happily, dated. It was released at the peak of what was called “the frat pack” aesthetic in the press—comedies about bros simply bro-ing it up with no apologies beyond a third-act fig leaf gesture toward alleged enlightenment. Think of Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson in Zoolander, or Stiller and Vaughn in Dodgeball, or Will Ferrell opposite almost all of them in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy. Unlike the renaissance of slacker comedies that would come later on in the 2000s, largely thanks to producer and director Judd Apatow, the “frat pack” comedies were not about losers realizing the power of their friendships; it was about winners already knowing their bromances and good ol’ boy confidence (read: network) would bail them out of any problem.

… Even including being caught crashing numerous strangers’ weddings and lying about who they were in order to sleep with wealthy bridesmaids, a la Wedding Crashers.

So yes, on the one hand it is hard to imagine a movie like Wedding Crashers getting made due to how the politics of the movie could be construed in a post-MeToo world—and that’s without touching the gay panic and rape jokes also in the film. However, Wedding Crashers’ age is interesting to process for an entirely different reason as well since it worked like gangbusters at a time where an original and raunchy R-rated comedy could not just be embraced by audiences for a weekend or two, but flourish in cinemas for nearly half a year.

There was even something faintly daring about Wedding Crashers in its moment 20 Julys ago considering that unlike all those other frat pack movies listed above, the film was rated R. That was a big bet at the time made by director David Dobkin. He even went to loggerheads with studio New Line Cinema about avoiding the PG-13 rating that had become standard in Hollywood comedies since the early 1990s. 

Indeed, while the R-rated raunchy comedy was an American standard popularized by the first crop of SNL stars in the 1970s and ‘80s—an era that also could have been called a “frat pack” since it was kicked off by Animal House, a movie literally set in a frat—that kind of coarse (and sometimes disturbingly lecherous) laugh was phased out when the same generation started having children of their own. Yet Wedding Crashers, even more than Old School a few years earlier, proved the raunchy laugher was back, complete with gratuitous nudity and tasteless stereotypes, sure, but also some pretty terrific performances to bolster it all in a way that appealed equally to men and women. In fact, according to New Line’s internal tracking, unlike the rest of the frat pack era Wedding Crashers’ audience split evenly between male and female.

This was in large part proven by the undeniable chemistry between Vaughn and Wilson, who apparently endeared themselves as a duo to Dobkin at the premiere of Shanghai Knights—another Wilson vehicle opposite Jackie Chan (showing again where family-friendly comedy was in the early 2000s)—by doing an Abbott and Costello routine. Wilson and Vaughn would go on to have infectious two-hander energy in Wedding Crashers, and neither of them had to play straight man Abbott to the other’s Costello. In one scene, Vaughn can improvise for nearly a minute about his fantasies of Jane Seymour, and in the next Wilson gets to flirt like an effortless rom-com lead opposite Rachel McAdams.

Still, in retrospect my favorite performances might be Christopher Walken as a typically Walken-esque, idiosyncratic politician—another canny choice since the studio wanted Burt Reynolds—and Isla Fisher who takes the underwritten “stage-five clinger” stereotype and elevates it into elite wealthy petulance personified. Fisher also deserves credit for fighting the producers against turning her comic creation into an object purely designated for lust (she said they wanted her nude in five different scenes in the script). For whatever it’s worth, she won the MTV Movie Awards’ “Best Breakthrough Performance,” in what amounts to another relic of the 2000s.

All of these elements melded together into a potent project that didn’t just please its studio, but wowed them when it opened in second place at the box office… and at $32.2 million.

“We would have been happy with $25 million this weekend,” David Tuckerman, the New Line head of distribution, told the press in 2005. “Any time you have an R rating you’re going to limit your audience.”

What’s remarkable about that admission is a studio would have been thrilled with a comedy opening at $25 million in summer 2005… and barring a Ryan Reynolds superhero spectacle, I suspect most studios would be happy with a comedy opening to $25 million right now as well. For context, Wedding Crashers opened bigger than Vaughn’s PG-13 antics the year before in Dodgeball, and Wilson’s PG-13 bid at IP exploitation with Stiller also in 2004, Starsky & Hutch. It also opened bigger than Anchorman and Zoolander. And it opened in second.

The same weekend that Wedding Crashers came out, it was beaten on the leaderboards by WB’s own new release, the Tim Burton remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Perhaps a harbinger of things to come, the original adult-skewing movie lost out to a family-friendly play toward mining nostalgia with a familiar brand. Although back then, Burton and Johnny Depp’s treatment of Willy Wonka certainly couldn’t be considered wholly “safe” for those who missed Gene Wilder and the O.G Oompa Loompas. Compare that to 2023’s Wonka, which played as a “prequel” to Wilder while completely neutering the character’s vague menace.

More pertinent to the time capsule nature of that summer though is that there was room for two big hits to open in the same weekend. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory grossed $56.2 million, and Wedding Crashers $32.2 million. That’s about $92 million and $52 million in 2025 dollars, respectively. By comparison the biggest original comedy released in theaters this year (so not based on a video game, comic book, or Stephen King short story) is probably Celine Song’s Materialists, which debuted at $11 million last month. But even that I’d actually argue was barely a comedy, despite what the marketing suggested, and it also was an indie produced by A24.

Instead one might have to go back to 2024 to find an original studio comedy like Fly Me to the Moon… which opened to $9 million before grossing $42 million globally.

By comparison, Wedding Crashers grossed more than $50 million in its first three days when adjusted for inflation, opened in second place, and then had what was fairly characterized in the press as a “sleeper hit” run. In its second weekend, it dropped only 19 percent at the box office; in its third it fell another mere 22 percent and leapfrogged past Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to become the number one movie in America.

Wedding Crashers would go on to play in North American cinemas until December, grossing $209 million domestically and $289 million worldwide (or about $475 million today). It ended its run as the fifth biggest movie of the year domestically, earning more than Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, or for that matter Batman Begins and Fantastic Four.

There are of course a plethora of factors to explain this. In the days before streaming, theatrical releases enjoyed a longer visibility in the zeitgeist and the box office; mainstream audiences wanted new stories instead of variations on the same ones they digested 20 or 30 years ago; and studios invested in original comedies, whether they be R-rated or PG-13.

However, unlike the death of the Western or the classic Hollywood musical in the late 20th century, there is no real major flop, or handful of them, in the comedy genre you can point to and say “that killed the studio comedy.” Wedding Crashers is dated now, but it paved the way for more R-rated comedies, some of which are considered classics like Superbad and Bridesmaids. Some are not but they still made a splash in their day (The Hangover, We’re the Millers). In fact, just before the pandemic, Game Night was an R-rated, adult-skewing laugher that also starred Rachel McAdams and grossed more than $115 million globally.

Yet the genre remains largely abandoned by studios to streaming, and those that do come to theaters (often as indies) are available for PVOD a month later. One wonders if like Wilson and Vaughn at a D.C. Chatunah, Hollywood should just go for it and see who else is ready to party like it’s 1999? Or 2005.