‘The Nice Guys’ With Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Rob Mahoney

March 24, 2026·1 hr 30 min·7 clips

Why did 'The Nice Guys' flop in theaters but become a beloved cult movie almost immediately?

CR month is still alive. The opening stretch has house-band energy: Volkswagen copy, Ringer podcast plugs, Rob Mahoney getting lovingly overexposed, and Chris Ryan wondering if a month-long celebration means he has worn out his welcome. The bit barely gets room to breathe. The table jumps from promo chatter into a wider argument about what 2016 still had and what current movie culture seems to have lost. The list carries it. Neighbors 2, Popstar, Deadpool, Everybody Wants Some, Edge of 17, Swiss Army Man, Sausage Party, Bad Moms, Keanu, and more become a fast roll call. The point lands because the pileup is the proof. R-rated comedy used to show up in bunches. Now the hosts feel lucky to get one of those movies in a year. Horror took some of the oxygen. Streamers get part of the blame too, since the room cannot picture them making many of these messy, rowdy comedies now. Then it gets personal. One host remembers watching those movies with his son, who was eight and then nine, right at the age where R-rated comedy feels like contraband. That aside gives the genre argument some heat. It is not just about release calendars. It is about finding these movies a little too early, with the danger baked into the fun. The backup take tightens the thread. Action comedy, they argue, is one of the most loved formats and one of the hardest to pull off. The casting has to be right. The room starts counting real wins and quickly ends up boxed into Pineapple Express, Hot Fuzz, the trilogy, and The Other Guys. Even the fake pitch starts moving. A throwaway Oscars trip and Vanity Fair party disaster becomes part of the same restless comic engine. The ending stays loose. They look ahead to maybe still doing movies in 2033, thank Rob and CR, and point listeners toward LA Confidential next week. Then the streaming check falls apart. Netflix confidence becomes an Amazon Prime correction, which is exactly the show's kind of exit: part programming note, part live fix, still moving.

As heard by us

"The Nice Guys" sends The Rewatchables into a sharp, funny autopsy of the disappearing R-rated action comedy.

The Rewatchables treats "The Nice Guys" as more than a beloved hangout movie. Bill Simmons, Chris Ryan, and Rob Mahoney use it to talk through how rare the R-rated action comedy has become, especially compared with the crowded 2016 comedy lane that included Popstar, Deadpool,…

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Why you'd press play

Bill Simmons claims he can count the century's successful action comedies on one hand.

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