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There have been 11 movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches. Three, maybe three-and-a-half, work. That’s, obviously, less than half of them. A few of them are truly awful. One of the successes is the sequel to another success. Those films are Wayne’s World and Wayne’s World 2. Why do they work while the others largely don’t? Because of the nature of the sketches those movies are based on.
In the verbiage of comedy writing, and also improv but that is a digression, there is talk of the “game” of the scene, or in the case of a show like SNL, of the sketch. Many recurring characters from SNL, even successful ones, are game-heavy. They are all about the game, and they are often one-dimensional. That’s okay in a sketch. It does not necessarily work over the course of an entire movie.
Well, to be fair, the game of “It’s Pat,” in addition to being dicey by modern standards, never even managed to sustain a full sketch. Why they opted to make it a film we’ll never know. The Coneheads worked as a sketch, as did MacGruber, but they struggle to be stretched out beyond what the “game” offers.
The “Wayne’s World” sketches are not as game focused. They are character based, and those characters aren’t one-dimensional. You can have Wayne and Garth operate out in the world. Yes, their TV show still needs to be part of the story, especially in the first movie, but there’s plenty of meat to be found beyond that. It was much easier for Wayne and Garth to escape the trapping of being in a sketch, because there was not a game that needed to be extended or be dismissed.
The other successful Saturday Night Live movie comes with an asterisk, as it is The Blues Brothers. That movie is based on SNL “characters,” but they weren’t really in sketches. They had no game. Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi just performed blues songs. They weren’t even one-dimensional characters, they were zero-dimensional, but that allowed the movie to basically create the characters while drafting off SNL’s success. Also, the film is loaded with cameos, musical performances, and car chases. It’s not character driven in any way, shape, or form.
We threw an “and a half” in the mix because Superstar is okay. It’s not bad, but we wouldn’t call it good. It’s successful compared to most Saturday Night Live movies, but it does suffer from trying to mine too much from a game-heavy sketch character.
They have effectively stopped trying to make movies based on SNL characters, having done only MacGruber since 2000, and that was in 2010. If they wanted to give it another shot, they should find some characters that exist outside the game of their sketches so they can allow them to operate in a fleshed-out way like Wayne or Garth. Excellent.
