Seth Rogen’s New Comedy Includes A Subtle Dig At 1 Of His Films
The satirical series features the Knocked Up star as Matt Remick, the newly-appointed head of a big-name Hollywood film studio tasked with turning around its ailing fortunes after a string of flops, sending up the modern movie business in the process.
And that evidently includes one of Seth’s own recent projects.
In episode one, his character is told by the company’s CEO of putting together a movie based around the drink Kool-Aid, which lights up the brand’s marketing manager (played by Kathryn Hahn) but also poses issues for him as a creative, having just given a press interview about how he hopes to put creativity above profit.
Later in the episode, when Matt tries to tell Kathryn’s character about his hopes to model the proposed Kool-Aid film on Greta Gerwig’s Oscar-winning Barbie, she retorts: “You wanna make a fucking fancy Kool-Aid movie? Why? Nobody even fucking watches the Oscars anymore.”
“Did Mario Brothers win an Oscar?” she adds. “No it didn’t. But you know what it did win? $1.3 billion.”
This was a nod to 2023’s The Super Mario Bros. Movie, which received a muted response from critics, but was the year’s highest-grossing animated film and second highest-grossing movie overall (behind Barbie).
While Chris Pratt and Charlie Day lent their voices to the iconic video game characters, Seth was also among the A-list cast, playing Donkey Kong.
In fact, Seth’s performance did come under some criticism, with one reviewer suggesting that “Seth Rogen has been hired to… just be Seth Rogen”.
Seth later told ComicBook.com: “I was very clear, I don’t do voices. And if you want me to be in this movie, it’s gonna sound like me and that’s it. And that was the beginning and end of that conversation.
“I was like, ‘If you want Donkey Kong to sound a lot like me, I’m your guy.’ But it did seem to work, you know, I think in the film and in the game I think all you really know about Donkey Kong is that he throws barrels and he does not like Mario very much.”
New episodes of The Studio are coming to Apple TV+ every Wednesday.