Peter Segal, the comedy director critics doubted and fans paid for

Peter Segal

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	April 20, 1962 New York City, United States
Occupation	Film director
Known for	50 First Dates, The Longest Yard, Get Smart
Awards	Emmy · Teen Choice

Peter Segal has made a career out of films that reviewers wrote off and audiences kept paying to see. His comedies have taken more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office, according to his studio biography, and very few of them won over the critics. The one fans quote back at him most often, Tommy Boy, barely earned back its budget in cinemas before home video turned it into a cult film. Behind that record sits a question Hollywood has never settled: what does a comedy director actually do when the stars are the reason people buy tickets?

Segal’s own answer has been to build the conditions and then step back. “You can’t teach chemistry,” he told Moviefone in an anniversary interview about Tommy Boy. “It sort of is what it is, you have it or you don’t.” He has directed Chris Farley, Eddie Murphy, Adam Sandler, Jack Nicholson and Steve Carell, and the films are remembered as theirs.

The movie business ran in the family before he joined it. Segal grew up in New York, the city where he was born on April 20, 1962, while his father headed publicity at MGM, and the family moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s. He studied broadcast journalism and English at the University of Southern California and started out writing and directing television. His studio biography credits that period with eight Emmy Awards in the Los Angeles market.

His way in came through Tom Arnold. Segal directed and produced Arnold’s HBO special The Naked Truth in 1991 and two follow-ups, and directed episodes of Arnold’s sitcom The Jackie Thomas Show. Both jobs put him in the same room as a young Chris Farley. “I knew that if I had an opportunity to ever do a movie that I absolutely wanted to work with Farley in a starring role,” he said three decades later.

His first feature was someone else’s franchise: Naked Gun 33⅓: The Final Insult, the third outing for Leslie Nielsen’s Frank Drebin, released in 1994. Tommy Boy followed a year later and nearly fell apart. Segal took a first draft by Bonnie and Terry Turner and pushed it toward the bond between Farley’s character and his father, which, he admitted, meant “unraveling the very thing that was greenlit.” With no finished script and his stars commuting between the Toronto shoot and Saturday Night Live in New York, he rewrote with Fred Wolf on their days away. Farley, bored between takes, started singing “Fat Guy in a Little Coat” to make David Spade break, and Segal’s editor told him to go back and shoot it again.

The film opened at number one, finished with $32.7 million against a $20 million budget and found its real audience on video. That year Segal set up his production company, Callahan Filmworks, with his longtime producing partner Michael Ewing. Callahan is also the name of the family auto-parts business Farley’s character fights to save.

The studio years that followed made him the director stars called when a comedy had to open. Nutty Professor II: The Klumps took $42.5 million in its first weekend in 2000, at the time the best start of Eddie Murphy’s career, and $166.3 million worldwide. Anger Management put Sandler opposite Jack Nicholson and opened to $42.2 million. 50 First Dates owes part of its Hawaiian scenery to Segal, who found the script’s café scenes “very claustrophobic” and pushed for them to move outdoors to Kualoa Ranch; the film has since been remade at least six times, in India, Japan, Iran, Mexico and Thailand. The Longest Yard gave Sandler the biggest opening weekend of his career at $47.6 million.

Get Smart was the peak. Steve Carell played Maxwell Smart, Anne Hathaway was Agent 99, and Dwayne Johnson and Alan Arkin filled out the agency; the film made $230.6 million worldwide on an $80 million budget. Segal had loved the Mel Brooks and Buck Henry series as a boy; a sequel built on a script Carell wrote himself came close, he later said, before time ran out.

The reviews tell another story, and Segal has never managed to change it. Newsweek’s David Ansen dismissed him over Get Smart as “a comedy specialist lacking any apparent sense of humor.” James Garner, who co-starred with Jack Lemmon in My Fellow Americans, went further in his memoirs, calling Segal “a self appointed genius who didn’t know his ass from second base.” The Longest Yard sits at 31 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, while audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an A-minus. Critics judged the films as personal statements and found them anonymous; the public judged them as star vehicles and found them dependable. The anonymity has a cost: his best film is still remembered as a Farley movie rather than a Segal one. The studios that kept hiring him seem to have regarded that as the point.

The theatrical model that made him has been shrinking since. Grudge Match, which put Sylvester Stallone and Robert De Niro in the ring as aging rivals in 2013, made $45 million worldwide on a $40 million budget. Second Act, with Jennifer Lopez, reached $72 million in 2018. My Spy, which cast Dave Bautista as a CIA agent outmaneuvered by a nine-year-old, was moved around the calendar by STX until the pandemic closed cinemas. Amazon bought it in April 2020 and released it on Prime Video that June, and by November Variety ranked it the third most-watched straight-to-streaming title of the year so far.

In between, Segal stepped in for Kyle Patrick Alvarez as director of Heels, Michael Waldron’s professional wrestling drama for Starz, and directed several episodes before the network cancelled the show in 2023. The My Spy sequel went straight to streaming as well. My Spy: The Eternal City, which he co-wrote with Jon and Erich Hoeber and shot partly in Venice, premiered on Prime Video on July 18, 2024. Critics were harsher still, with a 23 percent Rotten Tomatoes score, and Segal gave himself a cameo as an angry baker, credited as Pete Segal.

No new feature from Segal has been announced since My Spy: The Eternal City. What came instead was the anniversary. The 4K release of Tommy Boy in March 2025 sent him back on the interview circuit to talk about a film that once barely covered its costs and now sells as a collector’s edition. Whatever he directs next will land in a market that has moved mid-budget comedy almost entirely to streaming, the same move that rescued My Spy.

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Tags: Adam Sandler, Chris Farley, Get Smart, Peter Segal, Tommy Boy, 50 First Dates

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