‘Miss Congeniality’ at 20: Why Did Hollywood Abandon The Mid-Budget Female Star Comedy Vehicle?

The Sandra Bullock vehicle Miss Congeniality came out 20 years ago today, enough time that some aspects of the film cannot help but appear dated. The setup of a tomboy FBI agent learning a newfound respect for more conventional girly-girls by going undercover at a beauty pageant feels markedly ’90s, a rejoinder to a perceived close-mindedness in the era’s workaholic feminism. A few of the gay-panic one-liners from Bullock’s romantic opposite Benjamin Bratt about Michael Caine’s coach par excellence would probably be left on the cutting room floor these days. Not to mention the finale that climaxes with a bomb detonating to destroy a faux Statue of Liberty, the sort of stunt that would be unthinkable as soon as nine months later, in the post-9/11 world. But perhaps the most remote notion of all is that of a Sandra Bullock vehicle in the first place.

Let that be no impugnment of Ms. Bullock’s abilities or celebrity, but rather of the industry that once gave them a worthy platform. Today’s Hollywood is almost entirely bereft of projects like Miss Congeniality for A-listers like Sandra Bullock, a formerly robust breed of blockbuster gone all but extinct. Executives have moved away from the star-driven studio comedy, their bread and butter as recently as a decade and a half ago, and with it, they’ve moved away from the righteous path. A rewatch of Bullock’s career-defining performance will overwhelm any viewer above the age of 25 with memories of this kinder era, and the simple pleasures that came with high-concept premises executed with wit and charisma. We used to be so good at this, and so good were their spoils. It’s hard not to wonder what the hell happened.

Executives have moved away from the star-driven studio comedy, their bread and butter as recently as a decade and a half ago, and with it, they’ve moved away from the righteous path.

Miss Congeniality falls into a personal category I have mentally labeled The System Works Movies™, exemplars of the showbiz machine functioning as designed. We start with a promising fish-out-of-water dynamic that can create comic conflict, challenges to overcome, and character growth to undergo. This is literal by-the-book scriptwriting, its clearly defined three-act structure ticking all the boxes. There’s a relatable flaw (Bullock’s a huge klutz, who among us can’t relate), a hilarious sidekick (at maximum drollness, Caine kills each line), an arc leaving the protagonist changed for the better (instead of punching away her emotions, our gal gets in touch with her feelings). Elevated by clever writing and a gratuitously likable turn from its leading lady, this film and those of its ilk make formula into something comforting rather than benumbing. It’s like how the first time you hear a perfect pop song, you somehow already know how the chorus goes.

While attempts to emulate this particular model of success have brought about a lot of frightfully bad movies, they also yielded some of the best that American screen comedy has to show for itself over the past few decades. The wonderful Legally Blonde is the negaverse twin of Miss Congeniality, flipping the equation so that powder puff Reese Witherspoon finds herself amongst the alpha females instead of vice versa. Before both of them, Julia Roberts transplanted the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope personified into the tony interiors of Beverly Hills with Pretty Woman. Sister Act fits the profile, as Whoopi Goldberg’s uncouth lounge lizard hides out from the mafia in a convent. Of slightly more recent vintage, the most recent vintage I can think of, we have Easy A in 2010. Emma Stone’s a fish out of the grown-up waters of sexuality, a dorky yet exceptionally attractive virgin masquerading as the floozy everyone assumes she is anyway.

These titles were gargantuan hits for their studios, all clearing the $100 million benchmark with the exception of Easy A, which topped out at a $75 million gross (quite impressive relative to its $8 million budget). They weren’t all quite that cheap to make, but they did fall way short of the budget-bloat demanded by any given CGI spectacle. More importantly, they’re easily conveyed in pitch-meeting shorthand, which makes advertising simple; you hear “Reese Witherspoon goes to Harvard Law” and the movie immediately starts to take shape in your head. For so long, this was how business was conducted, with calculated risks generating the occasional surprise hit to compensate for any flops. With luck, a new movie star can be minted off a name-making smash such as these, bringing with them the promise of further paydays for the studio cultivating their popularity. 

But a look at the timeline frames Easy A as the end of an era, the last hurrah before efforts to sustain this type of filmmaking grew infrequent and ineffective. Solo comedies for actressses at the top of their game all but died out during the ’10s, as Tinseltown repeatedly failed to sell America on a new sweetheart and then appeared to lose interest in doing so. 2015’s Trainwreck foretold a bright future for Amy Schumer, a profitable venture doubling as a showcase for a winning personality with an original, atypical look. It took two years to get her back in cineplexes, with the dire one-two punch of Snatched (she and mom Goldie Hawn get kidnapped in the jungle) and I Feel Pretty (a head injury imbues a meek woman with sky-high self-esteem), both of which tanked. It took Rebel Wilson two Pitch Perfects to get her own shot — we discount How to Be Single, what with Dakota Johnson leading the pack — and then two more to get the deconstructionist romcom parody Isn’t It Romantic into theaters by 2019. “It isn’t romantic, no,” audiences responded, shunning the film with a $6.2 million opening weekend.

Melissa McCarthy would seem to be the spoiler to this critical framework, but I’d contend that 2015’s hysterical Spy is more like the exception proving the rule. McCarthy blew up in the wake of Bridesmaids in 2011, an ensemble piece much closer to the Apatow mold than the studio-comedy standard. Teaming with writers Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo, along with director Paul Feig, worked out for her then, and reuniting with Feig worked again on Spy. But she’s only as good as the material she’s working with, as we’ve learned from her numerous ill-fated collaborations with husband Ben Falcone (The Boss, Life of the Party, The Happytime Murders, Superintelligence). She’s gotten more than her fair share of chances, but there’s still a strong scent of BS to the way Schumer and Wilson have been hard up to find scripts worthy of their skills. Meanwhile, it feels like six months cannot elapse without another action spoof from the bankable, repeatedly forgiven Kevin Hart. 

He’s been able to carve out his own piece of an entertainment economy obsessed with franchising, in which characters a studio can own and control rise as stars while the actors portraying them can be interchangeably swapped out when their contracts get too expensive. Any executive worth their rolodex would rather take a near-guaranteed $800 million payout on a $200 million budget — who won’t show up for Avengers 5? It’s too big to fail! — than throw the dice on a $30 million production that could turn up with bupkus. The cumulative effect is an illusion in which Hollywood no longer has the movie stars to fuel human-scaled picture anymore, but that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that only makes the cinema landscape flatter and more boring.

An entire generation of female talent has been denied their shot at this version of the big time, with no choice but to settle for admirable bodies of work oriented around the indie spheres. Haley Lu Richardson, for example, has given us hard proof that she can do broadly funny (see: Support the Girls) and that she’s a good actress (see: Columbus). Where’s her Miss Congeniality? Or America Ferrera, so dependable over the five years she’s spent on TV’s finest sitcom Superstore? Or the severely undervalued Teyonah Parris (above), bristling with quips in Dear White People? Anna Faris had her Miss Congeniality moment in 2008 with The House Bunny, and she stuck the landing. Where’s the rest of her big-screen career? At least Tiffany Haddish seems to be doing well for herself.

To think that Miss Congeniality could some day be a relic of a forgotten movie mode is grim, but the good news is that it’s not beyond retrieval. The catch is that restoring this once-proud tradition to its former glory will require more than the simple willingness to do so. In these films, there’s no digital smoke and mirrors to insert during post-production as a cover for a lack of expertise. Nothing but good ol’-fashioned writing, directing, and acting can make The System Work, a course of action as difficult as anything else in life worth doing. Fortunately, the class of 2021 is more than up to the task. We’ve got plenty of would-be Sandra Bullocks waiting in the wings.

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.

Where to stream Miss Congeniality