The comedian Nate Bargatze is an indisputably titanic name in his field. He’s been the top-grossing stand-up in America for two years in a row, he hosted last year’s Emmys (albeit to mixed reviews), and he’s even planning on opening a theme park called Nateland in his hometown of Nashville. Consequently, there was every reason to think that his new movie, The Breadwinner, would break through with audiences; it’s a breezy comedy aimed squarely at families, ostensibly filling an underserved part of the market. But the film has been roundly dismissed by critics and theatergoers, basically disappearing from the box office after opening last week. Bargatze’s first effort as a leading man, it seems, is yet another reminder that even the country’s biggest performers might not be able to make a comedy into a theatrical hit anymore.
The Breadwinner is admittedly not very good. Bargatze plays Nate Wilcox, a beloved Toyota salesperson whose wife, Katie (played by Mandy Moore), runs their home like clockwork. When Katie successfully pitches her handmade organizer on Shark Tank, she must travel out of the country for a few weeks to work on the product—leaving Nate in charge of their three daughters and their many domestic needs. The premise is essentially a modern update of the 1980s hit Mr. Mom, which transitioned the stand-up comic Michael Keaton to movie stardom; he played a befuddled dad furloughed from work, forced to take care of the kids while his wife starts bringing home the bacon instead. The concept was already mildly stale in 1983; in 2026, jokes about Nate learning to use a toaster or a GPS come off as well past their expiration date, no matter how earnestly dopey a performance Bargatze gives.
The low stakes are supposed to be part of the charm, and they fall in line with Bargatze’s onstage persona. He’s a dry and soft-spoken stand-up who can nevertheless command an entire arena’s attention. His work is family-friendly and devoid of bad language, and it often quite cleverly inflates the tiniest domestic squabbles or husbandly mishaps into epic, run-on routines. Bargatze likes to be the butt of the joke, casting himself as the hapless but well-meaning dad who can barely keep track of his day-to-day needs. The Breadwinner’s effort to turn that character into a compelling protagonist can’t overcome the fact that Bargatze’s style is too laid-back to hold the center of a film.
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There are some brief flashes of inspiration: The supporting cast is stacked with talented comedians such as Kate Berlant, Kumail Nanjiani, Zach Cherry, and Will Forte, who are all doing lots of fun (and possibly improvised) gags. Even Saturday Night Live’s reigning king of smarm, Colin Jost, playing a henpecked husband, got some chuckles out of me. But although the director, Eric Appel, showed some stylish chops on his first movie (the high-energy biopic spoof Weird: The Al Yankovic Story), The Breadwinner seems actively intent on visually resembling a Verizon commercial; it’s as flat, simple, and static as possible. That the film is filled with an overwhelming amount of product placement (Toyota and Shark Tank are just the start) makes it feel only more uncinematic.
In the end, Bargatze’s big-screen experiment is doomed by its desire to be extremely ordinary. Hollywood used to pump out movies as mediocre but occasionally charming as The Breadwinner, buoyed by the always-reliable power of seeing a comedy with a packed audience in a theater. The conventional wisdom became that these films didn’t really travel beyond America, however, and were thus better fits for streaming. The Breadwinner is aiming to recapture the satisfaction of going to see a three-out-of-five-star movie, offering decent laughs in an inoffensive package. Yet in a cinematic landscape in which generational breakthroughs are currently happening at the box office—namely with the horror hits Backrooms and Obsession, each the debut feature of a 20-something, very online filmmaker—it seems that audiences find it hard to care about a moderately successful attempt at light entertainment. Forgetting it is much easier.
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