Nick Swardson Tells the Horrifying Story of When His Grandma Went to See ‘Grandma’s Boy’
Just because a movie is called Grandma’s Boy doesn’t mean it’s a family comedy. Hopefully, the moviegoing world learned that lesson long before the release of Dirty Grandpa.
Back in 2006, Happy Madison Productions released the gross-out slacker-stoner comedy Grandma’s Boy that, fittingly, underachieved at the box office, grossing just $6.6 million on a $5 million budget. The movie about a couch-surfing stoner and video-game tester would go on to have a thriving second life on the physical media market, but, at the time of its theatrical release, audiences didn’t bother with the critically reviled comedy about cum shots, bong rips and hanging out with your surprisingly cool grandmother — even one of the Grandma's Boy screenwriters’ own grandmas couldn’t stomach it.
During an appearance on The HoneyDew Podcast with Ryan Sickler, Nick Swardson revealed that Grandma’s Boy caused a minor family crisis for him when his own grandmother, from whom Swardson had hoped to keep the film’s existence a secret, assumed from the comedy’s title that her grandson had written a movie about her and was one of the few to see Grandma’s Boy in theaters.
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Said Swardson of his poor Nana’s reaction to Grandma’s Boy, “My nurse took her in her wheelchair, and my grandma walked out of the movie.”
Clearly, Swardson’s poor grandmother had a developed palate for film, as her feelings on Grandma's Boy were shared by almost the entire critical community at the time of the movie’s release. For instance, in his ruthless review, Entertainment Weekly's Gregory Kirschling wrote, “Grandma’s Boy, a low-gas frat comedy about a 35-year-old video-game tester (Allen Covert) who moves in with his grandma and her two friends, does a very thorough job of reducing every recognizable member of the cast to probable career lows.”
Of course, anyone who appears in an Adam Sandler-produced movie is automatically risking such an attack on their career from critics, but, in this case, Kirschling was entirely off-the-mark, even despite the film’s uninspiring performance at the box office. The DVD release of Grandma's Boy grossed an impressive $35 million in sales, and that's not even counting the cash the movie made as a veritable rental blockbuster. In fact, Swardson once claimed that, years after Grandma's Boy became a sleeper DVD hit, he and Sandler met the CEO of Blockbuster who told them that Grandma's Boy was “one of their most stolen movies of all time” because everyone who rented the DVD ended up keeping it instead of returning it.
Presumably, none of those movie thieves was Swardson’s own grandma, who likely hoped that Grandma's Boy would go the way of Blockbuster itself and die a slow, painful death.
