Today Superbad is often looked back on as a classic teen comedy, but it took over a decade for the movie to get made. The script was originally written by comedian Seth Rogen and frequent collaborator Evan Goldberg, who began working on the project when they were just 13 years old. The finished script was heavily inspired by their experiences throughout high school, hence the two central characters being named Evan and Seth. Because of this source, the script was written in something like its finished version in the late 1990s, but Superbad didn't become a movie until 2008.
In the early years of his career, Rogen appeared in series like Freaks and Geeks and Undeclared, which were positively reviewed but quickly canceled, and struggled to gather more significant interest in his style of comedy. Rogen began trying to get Superbad made in 2000, but filming didn't begin until 2006. In the early stages of the project, Rogen was meant to play the Seth character based on himself, but due to aging out of the part, he was replaced by Jonah Hill. In his autobiography Yearbook, Rogen writes that many of his projects faced similar delays:
“Some movies are really hard to get made, Superbad took over a decade, Sausage Party, Pineapple Express, This Is the End, each took six to seven years, all because studios just couldn’t wrap their heads around how any of these movies could possibly make money.”
How Superbad Avoided A Comedy Movie Development Problem
During the early 2000s, teen comedies were generally raunchy romps in the vein of American Pie, while major studio comedies were generally fairly safe star vehicles, meaning that Rogen and Goldberg's script and its mostly cynical depiction of the end of teen friendships without major names attached would have been a hard sell. However, the comedy landscape changed dramatically due to the success of movies like 2005's The 40-Year-Old Virgin and 2007's Knocked Up. This brought in a new wave of stars including Rogen and Hill, and directors such as Judd Apatow and Paul Feig, who made more improvisational movies that were often about male friendships and the challenges of growing up.
The success of these movies likely made Rogen and Goldberg's Superbad script much more attractive for studios. In a way, it was better for the movie that it wasn't made sooner, as before the breakthrough success of Judd Apatow's comedies studios may have pushed for the humor of Superbad to be broader or more sex-focused. Instead, Rogen, Goldberg, and director Greg Mottola got to make the movie they wanted. The fact that the script was about the relatively universal experience of growing up also meant that it suffered less from the long production delay than a more topical movie might.
Why Seth Rogen's Later Comedy Movies Were Made So Much Quicker
Rogen has since became a prolific film star, appearing in both comedic and dramatic roles, as well as acting as a writer and producer for series like Preacher and The Boys. The same studio focus on established names which hamstrung Rogen's earlier attempts to make projects made now works in his favor, meaning that even idiosyncratic personal projects like An American Pickle are produced quicker than Superbad was. Now that Rogen is a bankable name, and his style of comedy has proven to be financially lucrative (in part because of Superbad, one of the best-grossing teen comedy movies ever), he is able to move quicker from concept to finished project. Ultimately, the long production period for Superbad and several of Rogen's other early projects shows just how sudden and unexpected Hollywood success can be.