Daily Inspiration Quote by Ivan Reitman

Reitman’s line has the casual shrug of a filmmaker who’s spent decades watching the culture pretend it has a single moral thermostat. He’s pushing back on the tidy “everything is worse now” thesis by reframing the debate: grotesquerie isn’t a new ingredient in cinema, the recipe is. Early film had shock, exploitation, and bodily comedy; what’s changed is the size of the audience that’s willing to clap for it, and the number of gatekeepers who can’t stop it.

The intent is pragmatic, almost producer-brained: standards aren’t fixed values, they’re negotiable limits. “What we accept” is about taste, but “what we can get away with” is about power - ratings boards, advertisers, distributors, streaming platforms, social media pile-ons. Reitman quietly acknowledges that transgression is partly a business model now. When the screen is “broader,” it’s not just that we’ve become tougher; it’s that the marketplace has segmented. If one crowd is offended, there’s another niche to monetize, another platform to host it, another algorithm to feed it.

The subtext is a little defensive, too, in the way veterans talk: don’t blame the artists for getting nastier; blame the ecosystem for widening the lane. Coming from a director associated with mainstream comedy, it also reads like a note about how gross-out humor migrated from the margins to the multiplex. The line refuses moral panic and replaces it with a colder observation: permission expands, and cinema, always opportunistic, expands with it.