It's a promising sign when Robert Di Niro is on board for a movie such as this. For a while he's been content taking easy-money comedy roles, but he rarely ever takes serious movies without having a lot of faith in the screenplay itself.
Did a quick check on the director and was quite surprised to find that the movie was written and directed by Todd Phillips. His back catalogue of work is almost exclusively cheesy comedies :-
...
Long story short, there's a reason you see a lot of comedy/horror 'genre' directors who can 'make the transition' into broader sensibilities. Your Peter Jacksons, your Adam McKays, your James Wans, your Russo brothers to name some more contemporary examples. James Cameron is another good example.
It has to do with them being good students of visual information transfer. To execute good horror/comedy
you have to know emotion and timing really well, and this ability often translates well into other emotional territories.
Roughly in order of ascending difficulty: horror -> comedy -> drama/sentimentality. AKA it's pretty hard to scare people without being laughed at, it's harder than that to get people to laugh without being cheesy, and it's much much much MUCH harder than that to tug at heartstrings without being laughed at and or being cheesy. (Obviously you'll get people who excel at one or the other)
Anyways, this is also why you'll never find a pro
of sufficient quality 'looking down on' a 'genre hack'
if that 'hack' work is well-executed. The former can see those 'hacks' know what they're doing and are making genre pics out of love of the craft and not because they don't know how to do anything else.
Hope that kind of illustrates why we sometimes see the 'comedy/horror' guy work his courage up to try his hand at 'more dramatic (difficult)' fare.
