Saturday Night Livemovies have a decidedly checkered history. In total, 11 sketches were adapted into movies, starting with a bang when theBlues Brotherswas born out of a 1976 sketch and became a film hit. Still, it would be over a decade before the secondSNLfilm,Wayne’s World, made it to the big screen. That gap may be because ofSNL’s somewhat fallow ’80s decade,but the success ofWayne’s WorldledSNLhoncho Lorne Michaels to continue these big screen adaptations, mostly in the ’90s.
Unfortunately, only 5 of those 11 films would even make their money back, withWayne’s World,The Blues Brothers,and their sequels accounting for 4 of them. One of them,It’s Pat, was so bad it bears the scarlet letter of a 0% Rotten Tomatoes rating. It’s no wonder Lorne Michaels stopped making them.
Saturday Night Live
The longest-running sketch-comedy/satire show on television, premiering in 1975, Saturday Night Live is a weekly series that features new hosts for each episode, with a core cast of actors and comedians that rotate over time. Episodes feature several skits that are sometimes ad-libbed on the fly, with the hosts engaging in most of them, and also provide musical guest performances that cap off each night.
Still, there were many more famous and recurring sketches that reached the early stages of movie development, only to end up being shelved or canceled altogether. For some, their root sketches were so laugh-out-loud hilarious it’s hard to believe they never made it closer to becoming movies. For others, it’s pretty obvious why they never made it past the conceptual stage.
This Fall,SNLwill reach its unprecedented 50th season,and while these famous sketches will likely never make their way to the silver screen, it’s still fun to speculate about what they could have been.
8Coffee Talk
Some of Mike Myers' greatestSNLoffspring were the “Coffee Talk with Linda Richman” sketches in the ’90s, for which Myers mined his Jewish mother-in-law and her many Yiddish expressions. These popular sketches never garnered bigger laughs than when Linda became “verklempt”, usually after the mention of her heroine,the chanteuse Barbra Streisand.At this point, Linda would usually request that her audience “Tawk amongst yourselves” as she gathered her composure and coiffed her heavily-hairsprayed ‘do. The sketch got many reprisals, and Streisand herself eventually made an appearance.
Coffee Talk Never Made It Far Into Development
Coffee Talksuffered failure to launch, as the initial clamor for more Mike Myers content afterWayne’s Worldfaded considerably due to the failure of films likeIt’s Pat. This may have been for the best, given the complicated gender dynamics that would have seen Myers playing a woman rather than posing as one like Dustin Hoffman did inTootsie. Still, Myers was in his prime at the time, and it feels like he could have made it work, even if aCoffee Talkmovie might not have aged particularly well.
7The X-Presidents
Another concept borne fromSNL’s ’90s heyday was a film version of “The X-Presidents,” one of the cartoon shorts included inSNL’sbrief “TV Funhouse” animated collection. Many of these cartoons came from the slightlytwisted mind ofSNLwriter Robert Smigel,who, along with writer-director Adam McKay (The Big Short), conceived of the animated sketch about ex-Presidents-turned-superheroes.
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The Scuttled Movie Attempt Became a Graphic Novel
Despite Smigel and McKay pitching to studio execs that their animated film could be made on a cheap $3 million budget, no studio felt that “The X-Presidents” had enough earning potential, as it usually didn’t air until the late sketch slots onSNL. Undeterred, the two writers refashioned their idea as a graphic novel for Random House in 2000, which is still readily available for purchase online.
6The Ambiguously Gay Duo
“The Ambiguously Gay Duo” was another animated brainchild of Robert Smigel, and garnered many laughs upon airing onSNL, although its content has proven non-representational and also wouldn’t have aged well as a movie. Smigel was involved in many anSNLmovie, which he apparently regrets somewhat, saying, “I’m guilty of writing probably as manySNLmovies as anybody, but [my own ideas] have never been made.”
Despite the Help of Stephen Colbert, Smigel Never Got the Film Moving
Smigel andfuture late-night host Stephen Colbertwrote a live-action script version of the sketch to be made as a feature-length film in the mid-2000s, but the project never made it into production. Hoping to salvage something out of the idea, they instead did a live-action sketch forSNLin 2010, starring Jimmy Fallon and Ed Helms. The sketch wasn’t exactly a world-beater, and proved that a movie version was probably a bad idea anyway.
5Key Party
The “Key Party” sketch onSNLwas a lighthearted spin on the slightly creepy ’70s free-love phenomenon, made famous in a super-cringe scenein the Ang Lee movieThe Ice Storm.This game was allegedly a big thing in the sex-positive ’60s and ’70s, when swinger parties were all the rage for the ethically non-monogamous. The sketch was a hit, first used in a Colin Farrell-hosted episode where Horatio Sanz got most of the laughs acting in drag.
Development of a Film Never Got Too Far
While Seth Meyers and Tina Fey saw a potential for a movie and wrote a treatment while they were still the main writers atSNL, the content may have been a bit too risqué for movie format. The two wrote a treatment, but never an actual script draft, after Lorne Michaels apparently steered Meyers and Fey away from pursuing the naughty idea any further.
4Bill Swerski’s Superfans
During that mid-90s era where seemingly anySNLsketch seemed fair game for movie development, one of the show’s biggest recurring sketches, “Bill Swerski’s Superfans,” got put in play for a potential film. The sketch featured a round table discussion where prototypical Chicago sports fans professed their home-field love for “Daaa Bears.” Chris Farley usually got the biggest laughs, when he would routinely have a heart attack during the sketches, thanks to his penchant for swallowing steaks whole.
Despite a Smigel/Odenkirk Script, Farley’s Success Put the Kibosh on a Superfans Film
Robert Smigel and Bob Odenkirk put together a script for the Superfans in 1995, with Smigel even quitting his writing job as Conan O’Brien’s head writer to work on the movie. Unfortunately for the film’s prospects,Chris Farley’sTommy Boybecame a big success in 1995.Farley’s agents felt their client had outgrown an ensemble film, and took him out of the running for a Superfans movie, effectively stopping the film in its tracks, as Farley was its biggest draw.
“Stefon,” the loveably-femme character played by Bill Hader, started out in a Ben Affleck-hosted episode in 2008, then moved on to becoming a “Weekend Update” regular thereafter — becoming Bill Hader’s signature character on the show. Stefon became famous for his wild partying at clubs with hilarious names like Gush, Blitzen, Mmhmm, and Jelly Bones, often causing Update host Seth Meyers to break character with uncontrollable laughter.
Seth Meyers and Bill Hader Conceived a Stefon Film Premise
OnSNLactor Bowen Yang’s podcastLas Culturalistas, Seth Meyers said he would have had a small part in aStefonmovie, but that his Weekend Update anchor would have died early on — after a long night of partying with Stefon. So someone else would have had to co-star, with James Franco being suggested as a potential clubbing cohort on Yang’s pod. Like many on this list, the idea didn’t advance far past the treatment stage, thoughHader is not opposed to the ideaof bringing Stefon back toSNL.
2Sprockets
Another one of Mike Myers’ hit characters onSNLwas Dieter, the host of the side-splittingly hilarious “Sprockets” sketch. The artsy German with the thick accent came out of Myers' work at the Second City improv group, and after the success of the firstAustin Powersfilm, “Sprockets” was optioned for movie development. Myers drafted a script, but was unhappy with the outcome and finally sought to abandon the project.
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A Series of Lawsuits Ensued After Myers Tried to Scrap Sprockets
When Myers attempted to make his exit fromSprockets, he was sued by Universal Studios for $3.8 million and Imagine Entertainment for a staggering $30 million. After Myers counter-sued, Dreamworks execs Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg stepped in to mediate, negotiating a settlement whereinMyers eventually agreed to doThe Cat in the Hat.
Given Myers' many great, European-accented characters inAustin Powers, it’s hard to believe thatSprocketswouldn’t have been a successful film, and it remains possibly the movie with the most potential on this list. Instead, we got a bummer-of-a-film withThe Cat in the Hat, and Myers' reputation began to suffer the fate he hoped to avoid by scrappingSprockets.
1Hans & Franz: The Girly Man Dilemma
Boy, was the cancelled “Hans & Franz” movie a missed opportunity. After the sketch became a smash hit when the all-star writing team of Robert Smigel, Conan O’Brien and stars Dana Carvey and Kevin Nealon made the “Pump You Up” characters two of the most famous inSNLhistory, a movie,Hans & Franz: The Girly Man Dilemma, was planned. In the film, the bulging duo would follow in their hero Arnold Schwarzenegger’s footsteps and travel to Hollywood to make it big as movie stars.
Arnold Got Cold Feet and the Film Fell Apart
Believe it or not,Arnold himself signed on to co-produceand appear in the film, but the mega-star got cold feet afterLast Action Herobombed and his team decided another satirical film wasn’t a good idea for the Austrian megaman. Still, it seems that the film could have had legs, even without Arnold’s involvement, as Robert Smigel claims the script was hilarious and Carvey and Nealon were then still in their prime. Now, the two have aged out of the roles and all we can do is wonder what could have been.
