Seth Rogen and Lonely Island Are Making Their Own Music Festival Disaster Movie
These days, we take our amusement where we can. For the past week, the internet has been entranced by the disaster that is the Frye Festival, a supposed music festival for rich millennials that quickly descended into anarchy when musicians and vendors pulled out due to its unsafe conditions. The full scope of the festival’s failure was laid bare in Friday’s piece at New York Magazine, where one administrator — or former admin, since she dropped as soon as she realized the full scope of the organizers’ failure — spoke candidly about the missteps leading up to the festival. For entertainment value, the Frye Festival just can’t be beat.
All of which would make for a pretty interesting movie, so thank goodness that Seth Rogen and The Lonely Island are already working on one. Yesterday, Rogen casually mentioned on Twitter (via The Hollywood Repoter) that he, Andy Samberg, Jorma Taccone, and Akiva Schaffer were already developing a movie about a musical festival gone straight to hell:
If you’ll pardon the pun, this announcement (Ja) rules. We’re about five years away from the Lonely Island’s Popstar being rightfully acknowledged as the musical masterpiece that it is, and another film where Samberg and company get to show of their musical and comedic chops sounds great to me. The visibility of the Frye Festival’s failure should make it easier for Rogen and company to get their movie made for the budget they want, especially if they lean heavily on current events in the pitch.
And honestly, it’s about time we got another comedy about a beach resort gone wrong. While most people have compared the Frye Festival to The Hunger Games, I’d offer a better comparison for Rogen’s movie: Broken Lizard’s Club Dread, the 2004 underrated (fight me) comedy about a beach resort that tries desperately to keep the lights on as a serial killer murders his or her way through the guests. Not only did Club Dread feature a great Bill Paxton performance — riffing on Jimmy Buffet, of all people — it also nailed the comedic potential of a bunch of drunk, rich kids finding the tropical life harder than they imagined. Let’s turn this subgenre into a thing.