Jeremy Garelick bought a high school to beat Hollywood’s comedy math

Jeremy Garelick

Photo: Lance Cpl. Trever Statz / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	November 30, 1975 New York City, New York, United States
Occupation	Screenwriter, director and producer
Known for	Dumb and Dumber To

On the edge of Syracuse, in upstate New York, there is a former school building whose corridors and lockers stay permanently dressed for adolescence. Jeremy Garelick bought it to shoot teen comedies there, one after another, at prices no studio accountant would recognize. The man behind the purchase had spent years at the expensive center of Hollywood comedy, writing for Vince Vaughn and doing uncredited rewrite work for Todd Phillips.

That double life is the clearest way to read him. Garelick directs the kind of star vehicle Netflix measures in tens of millions of viewing hours, and he runs a small factory upstate that bets the other way, on unknown teenagers and budgets counted in the hundreds of thousands. Within a single month, both halves of the operation reached screens. They told very different stories.

A New Yorker, born on November 30, 1975, Garelick studied film at Yale and went straight into the business side, as an assistant in the motion picture literary department at Creative Artists Agency. The apprenticeship that shaped him came next. He became Joel Schumacher’s assistant across four films, among them Phone Booth, and graduated to second-unit director on the director’s drama about the murdered Irish journalist Veronica Guerin.

The break came from a script written on the side. The Golden Tux, a spec comedy he co-wrote with Todd Phillips, sold to Dimension Films in 2002. It caught the eye of Vince Vaughn, who brought him in to co-write and co-produce The Break-Up with Jay Lavender: Vaughn and Jennifer Aniston as a couple who split up and refuse to leave the condo they share. The film was a commercial hit in 2006, and Garelick reunited with Phillips for an uncredited rewrite of The Hangover, the Las Vegas comedy that went on to gross more than $465 million.

The spec script came back. In 2013 Screen Gems hired Garelick to direct the film it had turned into, The Wedding Ringer, his first feature as a director, with Kevin Hart as a man who hires himself out as best man to grooms with no friends and Josh Gad as his most desperate client. Released in January 2015, it cost $23 million and grossed more than $79 million worldwide.

The reviews were another matter, and they still follow him. The film sits at 29 percent on Rotten Tomatoes; Kevin Maher wrote in The Times that it “manages to offend on so many levels that it’s genuinely remarkable,” and Paste, revisiting his career in 2026, filed it under racialized slapstick. For most of his career, the commercial instinct has not been the problem. The question critics keep asking is what the jokes are aimed at.

He moved into series with Best.Worst.Weekend.Ever., an eight-episode Netflix comedy he co-created, wrote, directed and produced in 2018. By then he had already made the decision that defines his career more than any single title.

In 2017, with his producing partner Will Phelps, Garelick paid $1 million for the former A.V. Zogg school building in Liverpool, a village just outside Syracuse, and turned it into American High. The arithmetic was the point: one permanent high-school location, paired with Central New York’s tax incentives. Banana Split was made for $1.2 million, Holly Slept Over for $500,000. The third film, Big Time Adolescence, with Pete Davidson and Griffin Gluck, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2019, was sold to Hulu and opened an eight-film licensing deal with the streamer. Each production hires students from Syracuse University, Ithaca College and Le Moyne College, and the building doubles as a trade school, the condition for zoning it as a film set.

He directed one of them himself. The Binge, released in 2020, spoofs the horror franchise where every crime is legal for one night, recast so that the forbidden thing is drugs and alcohol; its sequel, It’s a Wonderful Binge, followed in 2022. The Hollywood Reporter named him one of its top innovators of 2020. Variety described the output as the kind of teen comedy that has not been made at scale since the days of John Hughes. His own diagnosis was blunter: “Hollywood is less friendly to that material, everything now is algorithms.”

The schoolhouse never meant leaving the studios. In 2023 he directed Murder Mystery 2 for Netflix, reuniting Adam Sandler with Jennifer Aniston, the actress at the center of his first produced screenplay seventeen years earlier. It opened at No. 1 on the platform’s English-language film chart with 64.42 million hours viewed in its first days.

Rolling Loud: The Movie is where the two halves collided. Garelick wrote and directed it from his own life: according to Paste, the idea came after he snuck his 13-year-old son into the real Rolling Loud hip-hop festival and lost him in the crowd. On screen Owen Wilson plays the father, with Matt Rife, Christine Ko, Christian Convery and Henry Winkler around him, and Travis Scott appears as himself, the rapper who helps find the boy. That cameo became the film’s problem. When the first teaser appeared in May 2026, viewers tied the premise to the 2021 crowd crush at Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston, where ten people died, and pointed out that Live Nation, a co-organizer of Astroworld, was involved in the production. Paste built a long feature around the father of Madison Dubiski, one of the victims, arguing that the film rewrites a festival disaster as a rescue story.

Ketchup Entertainment released it on October 2, 2026, in 868 theaters and with little visible marketing. It opened to less than half a million dollars, the lowest theatrical debut of Wilson’s career, as MovieWeb reported.

Upstate, the factory keeps working. American High produced Pizza Movie, a stoner comedy from the sketch duo BriTANicK starring Gaten Matarazzo and Sean Giambrone, which premiered at SXSW in March 2026 and reached Hulu in April. On October 26, 2026, Netflix released the first 14 of 28 episodes of Minimum Wage, a mockumentary about teenagers running a chaotic pizzeria, adapted from American High’s own short sketches, which had drawn more than 30 million views online since May 2024. Its seven young leads also served as the writers’ room, with Randall Park joining them as Mr. Sylvester. Garelick and Phelps run it as showrunners. It is the company’s first television series and its first exclusive Netflix release.

The other 14 episodes of Minimum Wage still have no date. Their fate will say more about Garelick’s next decade than Rolling Loud did, because the model he built in a former school, unknown casts and small budgets shot in one building, now sells straight to the most data-driven buyer in the business.

Tags: Todd Phillips, Vince Vaughn, Jeremy Garelick, Minimum Wage, Rolling Loud: The Movie, Murder Mystery 2

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