Wednesday, June 2, 2010

SNL's Least Greatest Hits

Dan's last post posted an interesting question-- and not just the fact that Box Office Mojo is quite often full of it, editorially speaking.

According to Wikipedia, It's Pat (1994) is the lowest-grossing "Saturday Night Live" movie ever made, at $60,822 (on 33 screens). Whether or not that includes the four dollars I paid to rent the laserdisc is not known. Even adjusted for Zimbabwean sort of inflation, this can't be.. er, underdone.

Stuart Saves His Family (1995) is next with $912,000 in receipts. It's wasn't good enough, it wasn't smart enough, and darn it, people hated it. Good thing Al Franken found a job outside show biz to fall back on.

Then the BO jumps over tenfold to MacGruber (2010, $10,000,000), then The Ladies Man (2000, $13,616,610) and Blues Brothers 2000 (1998, $14,051,384). The rest of the SNL stable of shaky cinematic spin-offs managed to be somewhat profitable-- Superstar (1999) did over $34 mil on a $14 mil budget.

Bear in mind MacGruber is just out of the gate: It may yet achieve a Coneheads (1993) level of mild success. Or just avoid being a complete failure.

2 comments:

  1. Ah but you see, They specified national release, and I think neither Pat nor Stuart went wide. Like all SNL comedies they went broad, but that's not the same thing.

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  2. I dunno. 33 screens for IT'S PAT ain't much, but it's decent saturation in all MAJOR American urban markets. I'll concede this one as a "platform release" and relieve of the ignominious lowest place.

    The IMDB does not list how many screens STUART was released on, but at nearly a mill of BO it probably went out truly wide and crashed spectacularly.

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