Spa Weekend opened in theaters today, and it is the kind of movie that used to arrive every third week and now shows up about as often as a comet.
Four extremely funny women, one luxury getaway, an R rating, no superhero in sight, and no source material anyone has to have read first.
The Setup Is Deliberately Ancient
Three lifelong friends book a spa break in Palm Springs to decompress. Their fourth friend, the one whose life is a rolling emergency, turns up uninvited. Things deteriorate. You have seen this architecture before, which is fine, because so have Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, who wrote it and directed it.
Those two names are the interesting part. Lucas and Moore wrote The Hangover, then wrote and directed Bad Moms, which means they have twice built an enormous hit out of exactly this premise: a group of people with responsibilities briefly abandoning them. The cast is Isla Fisher, Leslie Mann, Anna Faris and Michelle Buteau, which on paper is a murderers’ row of comic timing, and the rating is R for language throughout, sexual material and some drug use, which is a rating that tells you nobody was aiming for a family audience.
Black Bear is distributing, and set the date back in January as part of a 2026 slate that also includes a Guy Ritchie picture and a Matthew McConaughey one. Late August is a slot studios use for films they believe in but do not want standing next to a tentpole.
The Reviews Land on “Fine,” and the Cast Is Not Why
The critical consensus so far is a polite shrug with a sharp edge. IndieWire’s review ran under the headline that these funny women deserve a much better break, which is about as clear a diagnosis as you get: the performers are doing the work, the screenplay is not meeting them.
ScreenRant landed in similar territory, calling it a mid-tier R-rated comedy that is good for a few laughs without pretending it is the next Bridesmaids. The Irish Times was blunter, running the review under the observation that Bridesmaids has a lot to answer for, which is a fair complaint about the last fifteen years of studio comedy generally and not really this film’s fault alone.
The recurring note across all of them is that Mann, Fisher, Faris and Buteau play believable lifelong friends, and that the emotional beat the script is reaching for does not quite arrive. Which is a specific kind of disappointment. Nobody is saying the movie is unwatchable. They are saying it is a 6 when the ingredients suggested an 8.
The Genre It Walked Into
Here is the context that makes a mid-tier grade matter more than it should.
Comedy accounted for roughly 1.9 percent of domestic box office revenue in 2025. In the years starting around 2013, the figure ran between 15 and 20 percent. That is not a dip. That is a genre falling through the floor, and the causes are structural rather than mysterious: the collapse of the DVD market took away the back end that made mid-budget comedies profitable, streaming absorbed the audience that used to show up on a Friday for something light, and the laughs that remained in theaters migrated into action films wearing a comedy hat.
Earlier this month the market provided a live demonstration. Super Troopers 3 opened to about $4 million, a number that would have been considered a catastrophe for a comedy with that much brand recognition in any year before the pandemic and is now simply what happens.
Spa Weekend also opens against a Spider-Man that is still pulling roughly $35 million in its fourth weekend, which is the sort of gravity a mid-budget comedy has to work around rather than through. The broader summer box office has been healthy enough, which makes the comedy number more damning, not less. People are going to the movies. They are just not going for this.
Why Anyone Still Makes These
The optimistic case is straightforward and mostly correct. Comedies are cheap relative to anything with a visual effects budget, they have long tails on streaming, and the audience for a film about four women in their forties behaving badly is real, underserved, and demonstrably willing to turn up when the movie is good. Girls Trip made $140 million on that thesis. Bad Moms made more than $180 million worldwide on it.
The pessimistic case is that a comedy needs word of mouth to work, word of mouth needs the movie to be genuinely funny rather than adequately funny, and adequately funny used to be enough because a mediocre comedy could still make its money back on video. That safety net is gone. In 2026 a comedy either connects or it does not, with very little middle ground, which is a brutal market for a film critics are calling a good enough time.
Whether Spa Weekend clears its number will say less about Lucas and Moore than about whether there is still an audience that will leave the house for a comedy without a franchise attached to it. That is a genuinely open question, and the answer arrives Sunday.