Jennifer Aniston has never made a comic book movie. (But she has made a Leprechaun.) There may be a reason for that: They’re not her favorite genre. The actress made her name on TV, with Friends, but she at least once used to be a staple of the big screen as well, mostly making comedies and rom-coms, plus the occasional indie drama, like The Good Girl and Cake. While promoting her new newsroom series The Morning Show, she vented her frustration that there isn’t much variety at the multiplexes these days.
Aniston was speaking to Variety (in a bit teased out by Entertainment Weekly) about how she finally decided to go full-time on another show, which she hasn’t since Friends ended in 2004. That got her thinking out loud about how mainstream movies these days are almost exclusively franchises and/or animated family movies, with only the occasional Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The rest tends to wind up on Netflix — even her recent Adam Sandler movie, Murder Mystery.
“It wasn’t until the last couple of years when these streaming services were just sort of exploding with this amount of quality that I actually started to think, “Wow, that’s better than what I just did,” Aniston told Variety. “And then you’re seeing what’s available out there and it’s just diminishing and diminishing in terms of, it’s big Marvel movies. Or things that I’m not just asked to do or really that interested in living in a green screen.”
She continued:
“It’s changed so much. I think we would so love to have the era of Meg Ryan come back. I just think it would be nice to go into a movie theater, sit cozy. I think we should have a resurgence. Let’s get the Terms of Endearment back out there. You know, Heaven Can Wait, Young Frankenstein, Blazing Saddles, Goodbye Girl.”
It’s a fair point, and she’s not as hostile towards comic book movies as, let’s say, the director of Goodfellas. Hell, even that new, gritty, downer drama about an unraveling loner in a decaying city is a comic book movie. There’s no sign that Aniston will get her wish, to be back in multiplexes without having to slip into spandex and stand in front of green screens. Till then, she has The Morning Show, a comedy-drama that unites her with Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell, in which her character has to fight to keep her job after a network shakeup.
