‘Saturday Night Live’ Has a Rough Track Record of Turning Sketches Into Movies. That Doesn’t Mean It Should Stop Trying
We’re celebrating 50 years of “Saturday Night Live”! All this week, we’re digging into the late-night comedy institution with new stories, including lists, essays, interviews, and more.
When “The Blues Brothers” hit theaters in 1980, it opened a Pandora’s Box that would eventually gift Hollywood films like “Wayne’s World” and curse it with abominations like “It’s Pat” and “Coneheads.” John Landis’ ultra-cool film about two brothers on a mission from God to get the band back together was bursting with Chicago blues performances, epic car chases, and enough celebrity cameos to fill a season of “Saturday Night Live.” Grossing over $100 million on a $27 million budget, it proved to many that characters who originated on Lorne Michaels’ NBC variety show were more than capable of carrying their own feature film.
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In theory, that was true. With “SNL” exploding in popularity and Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi wading into movie stardom, it made perfect sense to combine the two mediums. But Belushi’s death paused all talks about a “Blues Brothers” sequel, and it took 12 years for another “SNL” movie to materialize. 1992 saw Michael Myers and Dana Carvey bring “Wayne’s World” to the big screen, once again striking gold by expanding the world of a popular sketch with the help of celebrity cameos like Alice Cooper. A sequel was quickly greenlit, and it must have felt like “SNL” films couldn’t miss.
From there on out, almost all of them missed.
The 1990s and early 2000s spawned a dark run of mediocre films inspired by “SNL” sketches. Aykroyd found considerably less success with “Coneheads,” an incoherent mess of a sci-fi comedy that amounted to little more than a disjointed collection of scenes where aliens do “weird” things like eating toilet paper and sleeping standing up. “It’s Pat” took an ongoing sketch about a character who wasn’t obviously a man or a woman — which, to use the most charitable terms, does not align well with modern sensitivities — and stretched it into a borderline unwatchable collection of gender-based puns. The Harold Ramis-directed “Stuart Saves His Family” was received better than some, but was a massive box office failure that failed to crack $1 million against a $12 million budget.
One of the stranger “SNL” films of the decade was “Blues Brothers 2000,” which saw Aykroyd and Landis trying to resurrect “The Blues Brothers” with John Goodman stepping in for Belushi. Both men have largely disowned the film, which introduces elements of the supernatural to the Blues Brothers universe and boasts some of the worst special effects ever seen in a studio film. The film follows a similar plot structure to its predecessor, save for the fact that Jake Blues is now being followed by a largely-ignored child that was apparently forced on them by studio executives who insisted on adding a kid to the movie.
The run of films wrapped up with “Superstar,” Molly Shannon’s thin attempt at giving her Catholic schoolgirl character Mary Catherine Gallagher the Hollywood treatment, which fails to be more than a formulaic rom-com; “A Night at the Roxbury,” a surprisingly funny clubbing comedy that showed flashes of the movie stardom that was on the horizon in Will Ferrell’s future; and “The Ladies Man,” another serviceable entry that gets by on the strength of Tim Meadows’ charisma as the ’70s-inspired talk radio host.
From there, it looked like “SNL” movies were a thing of the past until “MacGruber” hit theaters in 2010. A flop upon its initial release, the film has steadily gained a passionate following in subsequent years for its “Hot Rod”-esque absurdity and spawned a successful Peacock limited series in 2021. If that’s the last “SNL” movie we ever get, things will have ended on a high note. But as the show continues to produce new stars and shape pop culture as it enters its sixth decade on the air, is it time to take another shot at Hollywood?
The conversation about “Saturday Night Live” movies would be so much simpler if they were all bad. Watching a film like “It’s Pat” or “Coneheads” stumble through a plotless series of unfunny jokes that would barely be watchable in a three-minute segment, it’s tempting to conclude that sketches and films are just fundamentally different mediums. What’s funny in bite-sized pieces at midnight is very different from what prompts us to invest 90 minutes in a character, and it would be reasonable to declare that these sketches just don’t have enough meat on them to justify film treatments. But “The Blues Brothers,” and “Wayne’s World” are universally acknowledged comedy classics, and “MacGruber” isn’t far behind them. Why do they work when so many others don’t?
Jake and Elwood Blues were the ideal characters to start with, as they were instantly recognizable cultural icons who were still underdeveloped enough to offer filmmakers a blank canvas. The kind of relic that only could have emerged from an upstart variety show, the act straddled the line between music and comedy without ever fully committing to either. The two characters never appeared in actual sketches, but frequently appeared as the show’s musical guest in the first years of “SNL.” Dressed in cool suits and fedoras, they’d perform covers of R&B classics like “Soul Man” while doing over-the-top dance moves with straight faces. It was easy to shoehorn them into a feature-length musical car chase extravaganza because the Blues Brothers were ultimately just a vibe.
The same could be said about “Wayne’s World” and “MacGruber.” Neither film clung too closely to the confines of the sketches that inspired it, they simply used the tone and worldviews of those characters as jumping off points. “Wayne’s World” embraced the slacker humor of its rock and roll-obsessed basement dwellers but thrust them into a zany world that was all their own. And “MacGruber” largely ignored the “MacGyver”-inspired premise of its sketches until the very end, opting to use the character as a vessel for a parody of over-the-top action movies that would have been just as enjoyable without the “SNL” connection.
The formula for making good “SNL” movies is complicated, but the path to making bad ones is simple: simply try to recreate a popular sketch, and you’re doomed to fail. Films like “Coneheads” and “Blues Brothers 2000” also suggest that it’s a bad idea to revive decades-old sketches as nostalgia plays. But when talented filmmakers are given the opportunity to build something unique around a recognizable character at the moment when it’s culturally peaking, the results are a bit better. Watching “Saturday Night Live” has always been a mixed bag, as all of your favorite sketches probably aired in an episode that also included some forgettable duds. But if we agree that the mediocre sketches are a small price to pay for the classics, we should apply the same logic to the films. If anything, Lorne and co. should try making even more movies.
With mid-budget comedies becoming a harder and harder sell in Hollywood, the built-in I.P of “SNL” characters could be a Trojan Horse that helps the next wave of comedy stars break into the film industry. The next Will Ferrell-level star could be waiting in the wings, but we might not get their “Elf” if they don’t get a chance to break in with their “Night at the Roxbury.”
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