Will Ferrell has still got it. From movies like Eurovision, Spirited, and now You’re Cordially Invited—coming to Amazon Prime Video tomorrow—the 57-year-old movie star is every bit as hilarious, genial, and appealing as he was twenty years ago. And that’s thanks, at least in part, to his shift to streaming movies.
It’s hard to overstate just how big Will Ferrell was in the 2000s. He left Saturday Night Live to pursue a string of massive, quotable, box office hits—Elf, Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers, just to name a few. For a good fifteen years, he was the undisputed king of comedy. But in the late 2010s, Ferrell—like many comedy movie stars—struggled to make a splash in the wake of shifting studio interest away from mid-budget comedies and toward superhero franchises. For a few years, much of Ferrell’s time was thus spent on the only kinds of comedies getting green lit: lackluster sequels to previous hits.
But over the last five years, Ferrell has found a new home in streaming original movies. It started in 2020 with Netflix’s Eurovision Song Contest: A Story of Fire Saga; a delightful parody of the European singing competition that Ferrell co-wrote, produced, and starred in as an amateur Icelandic singer. (“Play ‘Jaja Ding Dong’!”)
Then came 2022’s joyful Spirited for Apple TV+, a modern-day musical retelling of A Christmas Carol starring Ferrell as the Ghost of Christmas Present, and Ryan Reynolds as his unlucky haunt-ee. Last year, Ferrell allowed fans a rare glimpse at his off-screen persona in the critically-acclaimed Netflix documentary Will & Harper, in which Ferrell joined longtime friend and former SNL colleague Harper Steele on a road trip, after she came out as trans. And now, Ferrell has taken his talents to Amazon Prime with You’re Cordially Invited, his new comedy with Reese Witherspoon that begins streaming tomorrow.
In You’re Cordially Invited, which was written and directed by Nicholas Stoller (Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Neighbors, Bros) Ferrell stars as a doting single father named Jim, who is determined throw his daughter (Geraldine Viswanathan) the perfect wedding… only to find out the venue double-booked him and another wedding party (led by Witherspoon). Ferrell slips effortlessly into the role of a father who makes his daughter his entire personality, complete with embroidered pillows and fridge magnet shrines.
His beard may be gray now, but Ferrell still authentically embodies his signature boyish persona. Immature antics include, but are not limited to: fighting with his daughter like a sulky teen girl, announcing his wife is dead in a goofy voice, and wrestling a live alligator. It feels like classic Ferrell, and, at the same time, like a new era of goofy dad antics.
As with Eurovision and Spirited, critics were not particularly enthralled by You’re Cordially Invited. But based on the sheer volume of marketing for the film, Amazon expects it to be a hit. And it probably will be. Though it’s tricky to measure Ferrell’s streaming success, due to a lack of box office and inconsistent streaming data, the information we do have suggests most of these projects have been wins.
Eurovision topped Netflix’s trending titles listed when it premiered and garnered strong online buzz. We don’t have exact numbers, but we know it was at least enough of a hit for Ferrell to now be adapting the film into a Broadway show. According to a 2023 Deadline report, Spirited garnered upwards of 228,500 views in the first two days of its release, making it one of Apple’s biggest original films to date. And Will & Harper was a huge critical success, with a 99 percent score on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes, and a Critic’s Choice Award win for Best Documentary Feature of 2024.
There are theatrical exceptions. Notably, Ferrell had a small (but memorable, and, arguably, perfect) supporting role as the CEO of Mattel in Barbie, the biggest movie of 2023. Conversely, he starred as the voice of a raggedy dog in the 2023 Universal comedy Strays, which failed to earn back its production budget at the box office.
But it seems undeniable that Ferrell has found a way back to making enjoyable, original, and popular comedy films thanks to the rise of streaming. He might not be quite as big as he was in the 2000s, but, so far, the ’20s—and, for the actor, his 50s—are looking good for Ferrell.