Jonah Hill's Comedy Bombed a Test Screening and Warner Bros Pulled the Release Date
Cut Off was supposed to open on July 17. Jonah Hill and Kristen Wiig playing wealthy siblings in their forties who get cut off by parents played by Bette Midler and Nathan Lane. Hill called it “pure stupidity” at SmartLess Live last weekend and promised audiences to leave their brains at home. It was the kind of pitch that sounds confident. Then Warner Bros. quietly removed the film from their release calendar.
A test screening did not go well. No promotional material had been released. The studio did not name the film during their CinemaCon presentation. The combination of signals is not ambiguous.
Hill has been having a complicated spring. He is simultaneously one of the more interesting people in Hollywood — Outcome, his directorial effort with Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz, received serious attention — and one of the more embattled, managing ongoing fallout from the Sarah Brady text message scandal and media fascination with his physical transformation. He recently disclosed he had married his partner Olivia Millar and that they have a second child. He has been unusually public for someone who spent the last several years explicitly retreating from public life.
The comedy business at studios has been bad for long enough that a single test screening can crater a release window entirely. Whether Cut Off finds a new date or disappears into post-production revision depends on whether Warner Bros. thinks the underlying material can be fixed or if the problem is structural. Hill, for his part, said he intends to make a funny movie every year. The release calendar suggests the market will not simply take his word for it.