“We’re proud of this thing”: the movie that Will Forte admitted “shit the bed”
Will Forte got the last laugh when it came to one of his biggest post-Saturday Night Live projects.
SNL isn’t just a tool that has identified the most important comedic stars of each generation, but a source of inspiration for many hit comedy films. Starting in 1980, when John Landis got Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi to reprise their roles from a recurring sketch for ‘The Blues Brothers’, many SNL characters have made the leap from the small screen to the silver one.
The quality of these Saturday Night Live-inspired films has been varying, to say the least. Wayne’s World is a film that became even bigger than the original sketch and helped to turn Mike Myers and Dana Carvey into legitimate movie stars. At the same time, the disastrous Coneheads was a complete flop that may have actually ended up generating negative publicity for the show itself.
Saturday Night Live adaptations were relatively quiet in the 21st century, as they had been having to settle for being niche hits. Office Space had been based on a popular sketch series that Mike Judge created, but didn’t end up reaching an audience until a few years after its release, when it began to pop up on cable and home video.
However, another attempt was launched with 2010’s MacGruber, a film that starred Will Forte at his funniest as an eccentric, over-the-top action hero, aimed at satirising ‘80s action stars like Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Mel Gibson, and directed by Jorma Taccone, one of the members of The Lonely Island, who had begun making digital shorts for Saturday Night Live with Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaeffer. While the sketches were quite popular, it sadly didn’t translate into box office success. Although Forte admits to being initially disappointed, he began to develop a different way of thinking about MacGruber.
“The movie came out and just shit the bed, just did tremendously badly,” he said, “It was tough for a couple weeks, and then, me and John and Jorma, my other buddies who we all made the movie together, we all just got together and said, ‘You know what? We’re proud of this thing. Eff it’.”
Forte was right to be proud, as the film soon developed a cult audience. It coincided with a time in which both Forte and Lonely Island had begun to crossover and become mainstream successes, with the latter eventually going on tour, and Forte would reach another level of fame when he starred on the popular FX comedy series Last Man on Earth.
Forte’s greatest point of pride might have to be the high-profile fans of MacGruber. Christopher Nolan is a huge admirer who was said to be “howling uncontrollably” watching the film, which might be a surprising fact given that he’s not known for making comedic projects.
While Nolan has praised other modern films from directors he’s admired, such as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, his endorsement of MacGruber is the only instance in which he has gone out of his way to mention something so overtly comedic. It may have even helped the film’s enduring legacy, as Forte would later reprise his role for a Peacock limited series of the same name.
