CinemaCon Report: 'Bad Moms' Stars Share Their Own Bad Mom Stories

The cast of “Bad Moms”, Kathryn Hahn, Mila Kunis, Jada Pinkett Smith, Christina Applegate, Kristen Bell and Annie Mumolo (Photo by Eric Charbonneau/AP Images)

Movie titles don’t come any more on-the-nose than Bad Moms, the upcoming R-rated comedy about a group of fed-up, worn-out mothers. “Let’s be bad moms,” in fact, is even a line of dialogue in the trailer that emerging studio STX unveiled at CinemaCon in Las Vegas on Tuesday before bringing out stars Mila Kunis, Kristen Bell, Christina Applegate, Jada Pinkett Smith, Kathryn Hahn, and Annie Mumolo.

The trailer shows Kunis, Bell, and Hahn conspiring to go rogue in response to Applegate’s fascist PTA head and their own unmanageable kids (“He called me a ‘c—’ for giving him the wrong juice box,” Bell’s character says at one point.) Soon, the ladies are serving their kids left-over nachos for breakfast, admitting they slept with Vin Diesel (“Vincent Diesel?!” another replies), and drinking their faces off. There are whip-its involved, too.

The cast said they bonded over the fact that they’re all moms themselves, including the newest member of that club, Kunis, who gave birth to her daughter Wyatt (with husband Ashton Kutcher) in October 2014. “It’s awesome,” Kunis told STX film chief Adam Fogelson about her parenting experience so far. “She’s crazy. Kids are crazy. I don’t really understand how they’re all alive. [It’s] human acknowledgement of, 'Hey, let me keep my child safe.’ If she was here, she would just walk right off the ledge. She has no concept of death.”

Kunis is keeping her safe, which makes her a good mom, but the cast then broke into their own bad mom stories.

“My daughter once, when she was 2, slammed the door in my face,” Applegate recalled. “And without even thinking, my husband [Porno for Pyros rock star Martyn LeNoble], and I both flipped her off.” The crowd howled before the actress clarified. “She didn’t see us! The door was closed… And then we looked at each other like, 'Wow. We are horrible people.’”

Mumulo, who Fogelman praised for co-writing the contemporary comedy classic Bridesmaids, one-upped her. “I’ll spend four-and-a-half hours packing my kid into my car and then finding myself cruising down, 75 miles per hour on the freeway, and she’s not strapped into her car seat,” she said. “That happened.”

“My kids are playing craps right now,” Hahn joked about the presentation’s setting in Caesars Palace.

Fogelson pointed out that by and large, the cast all has experience in R-rated comedies: Bell (The Boss) and Kunis (Ted) starred together in Forgetting Sarah Marshall; Applegate in Anchorman; Hahn in We’re the Millers and Bad Words; and Mumulo with Bridesmaids and This Is 40. All except Jada Pinkett Smith.

“I hadn’t done an R-rated comedy,” said Smith, who did just costar in last year’s Magic Mike XXL. “And I was like, 'Wow. Why not? I’m ready to be outrageous and a little filthy now that my kids are teenagers… Hey, I can cut loose a little bit now.” Her kids, with husband Will Smith, are Jaden, 17, and Willow, 15.

As for Bell, she didn’t spill any terrible parenting tales, but maybe that’s because she’s just an exemplary parent. As she told us recently while explaining why her kids don’t binge on Frozen like the rest of America’s youth, they don’t even watch TV.

Bad Moms, which is written and directed by The Hangover scribes Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, opens July 29.