Ben Stiller is possibly one of the best-known actors from the 2000s and 2010s, and he’s got a lot of noteworthy roles under his belt.. From security guard Larry Daley in the Night at the Museum movies to the voice of Alex in the Madagascar movies, Stiller was able to find a surprising amount of success working on wacky, off-the-wall movies. Not everything can be a smash hit, however – take Zoolander 2 (2016). The movie released the same weekend as Deadpool and came up way short, leading Stiller to reveal he felt “blindsided” by the flop and re-evaluate some things about his acting/producing career.
Ben Stiller “Thought Everyone Wanted” Zoolander 2 – And They Didn’t
Zoolander, released in 2001, stars Ben Stiller as Derek Zoolander, a male model who falls in with top fashion executives who brainwash him into assassinating the Prime Minister of Malaysia. The cast was full of celebrity comedians, including Owen Wilson, Christine Taylor, Will Ferrel, and Jerry Stiller, among others. The movie received generally high reviews and made $60.8 million at the global box office, nearly doubling its $28 million budget.
Given the general success of Zoolander, it makes sense that Ben Stiller – who also wrote and produced the film – would be all-in for a sequel. Zoolander 2 premiered in 2016, with Stiller reprising his role as a retired Derek Zoolander who gets pulled back in to the fast-changing world of secret assassin models. Wilson, Taylor, Ferrel, and Jerry Stiller would all reprise their roles, and Zoolander 2 also included a whole collection of celebrity cameos from Justin Bieber to Neil deGrasse Tyson to MC Hammer, among many, many others. Unfortunately, Zoolander 2 didn’t even come close to meeting the original, and Ben Stiller told People the movie’s flop was life-altering.
“I thought everybody wanted this…And then it’s like, ‘Wow, I must have really f—ed this up. Everybody didn’t go to it. And it’s gotten these horrible reviews. It really freaked me out because I was like, ‘I didn’t know was that bad?”’…What scared me the most on that one was l’m losing what I think what’s funny, the questioning yourself … on Zoolander 2, it was definitely blindsiding to me. And it definitely affected me for a long time.”
Ben Stiller via People
Ben Stiller explained that although Zoolander 2 was a flop, the period of introspection that followed it was a blessing in disguise. In the same interview, he said that he had always been drawn to the idea of directing movies and “not necessarily comedies”. Zoolander 2, despite being a failure, gave him the space to work on other projects. In 2018, he would direct Escape from Dannemora and receive a DGA Award and a Primetime Emmy Nomination. Four years later, in 2022, Ben Stiller would board Severance as a producer and director, which would get him another DGA nomination – and maybe none of that would have happened without Zoolander 2, for better or for worse.
