Seth Rogen has said that negative reviews from critics are “devastating” and that some people in the film industry have “never recovered” from them.
Speaking to Steven Bartlett for the Diary of a CEO podcast, Rogen described negative press coverage as a “trade-off” for success in the film industry but said that criticism “hurts everyone”. He said: “I think if most critics knew how much it hurts the people that made the things that they are writing about, they would second guess the way they write these things.
“It’s devastating. I know people who have never recovered from it honestly – a year, decades of being hurt by [film reviews]. It’s very personal … that’s something that people carry with them, literally, their entire lives and I get why. It fucking sucks.”
“It feels like a very personal rejection,” he added.
Asked about Green Hornet, the 2011 superhero movie of which Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw said “everything about [it] is disappointing”, Rogen said: “The reviews were coming out and it was pretty bad. People hated it and it seemed like people were taking joy in disliking it a lot. But it opened to like $35m, which was the biggest opening weekend I’d ever been associated with. It did pretty well.”
In contrast, he said the reaction to the 2014 Kim Jong-un assassination comedy The Interview was “more painful”. “People [were] taking joy in talking shit about it, and really questioning the types of people that would want to make a movie like that.”
“That felt far more personal. Green Hornet felt like I had fallen victim, which was true, to a big fancy thing … That was not so such much a creative failure on our parts but a conceptual failure. The Interview, people treated us like we creatively failed and which sucked much worse.”
Rogen added: “Any opening weekend […] it sucks. It’s stressful. It’s like birth, it’s an inherently painful process.” But, he said, “in the grand scale of things, in life, it’s not that bad”. “Life goes on. You can be making another movie as your [current] movie is bombing. It’s bittersweet. You know things will be OK. You’re already working. If the fear is the movie bombs and you won’t get hired again, well you don’t have to worry about that.”
