20 Years Ago, Samuel L. Jackson Got Morbed With “Snakes on A Plane”

20 Years Ago, Samuel L. Jackson Got Morbed With “Snakes on A Plane”

Turns out internet memes have never been a reliable form of currency.

Summer 2006 seems like so long ago. Nintendo hadn’t released the Wii console yet. There were only two PlayStations so far. And proper journalistic style still held to the convention of capitalizing “internet.” Or rather, “Internet.” It was a proper noun at that point—a destination rather than a commodity.

In a lot of ways, the internet (née Internet) had only just begun to become an omnipresent force in the lives of normal people. Both YouTube and Gmail had only been around for a year or two (and were still separate entities). Heck, more people were on MySpace than Facebook, while X (or rather, Twitter—sorry, “Twttr”) was still just a little thing no one had ever heard of. And the idea of an internet meme was still considered more or less the height of wit and hilarity... at least by a certain kind of person. The kind of person who hopes they can haz cheezburger while taking possession of all your base.

The chronically online Millennial was a brand new force in American society. One that had begun to develop traction through social sharing sites like Digg, Fark, and Metafilter (Reddit was still years away from picking up momentum) or the dank innards of toxic online forums like Something Awful. Dumb jokes bubbled into existence on the Internet, circulated amongst the web’s dwellers, and occasionally took on a life of their own beyond the bounds of people who never, ever logged off. Remember there for a while when the world thought bacon was the acme of wit? That was Internet comedy escaping containment.

When weird new things happen repeatedly enough, those things eventually catch the eye of executives and marketers who occupy more traditional spaces. Such was the case with the amusingly titled Samuel L. Jackson thriller Snakes on a Plane. For all intents and purposes, the only thing Snakes on a Plane had going for was, in fact, its title and the fact that it starred Samuel L. Jackson. The movie sat squarely in the disaster/capsule genre that got its start in the 1970s with turgid thrillers like The Towering Inferno (fire in a high-rise building!), Airport (terrorists at an airport!), and Die Hard (terrorists in a high-rise building!) and found new focus with the likes of Speed and Air Force One, which shifted the action from large buildings to enclosed vehicles. Snakes on a Plane offered a perfunctory rendition of that concept, with some novelty coming from the fact that the premise was entirely accurate to the title: criminals unleashed dozens of venomous snakes inside of an airplane in order to kill a prospective legal witness... and everyone else onboard, presumably. Details, details.

It’s not a great movie, but it does scratch an itch for predictable formulaic action. It’s largely carried by Jackson, who had most recently been seen getting punked by a tag-team of Anakin Skywalker and Chancellor Palpatine in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. His exasperated determination and resolve to overcome a ridiculous situation as a hero promised to be a great return to his usual badass form for fans, who took to the Internet and began spinning up all kinds of jokes and memes about the upcoming movie. Chief among them: imagining a more Jackson-style (read: foul-mouthed) version of a line from the early trailers. Eager to build on this online heat, New Line Cinema actually went back and funded a few days of additional shooting near release to bump the rating from a safe PG-13 to an R, in large part to provide space for Jackson to bring the Internet’s made-up line to life for real.

New Line’s marketing team heavily tilted its efforts to fall in line with the Internet’s memes, jokes, and confabulated line reads. In a sense, it may have been the first blockbuster to be sold specifically to the Internet community.

And it was a pretty huge flop! The movie made back its modest budget, but it certainly didn’t live up to expectations. Maybe the Internet people didn’t want to leave their homes to actually see it in a theater (this was before iPhones, so going to a movie meant spending hours away from the Internet—scary stuff indeed!). Maybe all the Internet people saw it and there just weren’t that many of them. Whatever the case, Snakes on a Plane offered perhaps the first example of a lesson that Hollywood just doesn’t seem to want to accept. Namely, memes are just not enough to base a product’s future on.

We’ve seen it over and over again, most notably when 2022’s disastrous Spider-Man spinoff-but-not-really Morbius got a theatrical reissue based on the popularity of an internet (the small-i internet by this point) meme, “It’s Morbin’ Time!” The studio took this to mean that social media power users had developed a newfound appreciation for the movie and would flock to see it if it appeared in theaters again. They did not. The reissue was even more disastrous than the original run!

Still, you can’t fault Snakes on a Plane or Jackson for the 2006 film’s iffy performance. The creators knew exactly what they wanted to make (a schlocky disaster flick)—and, for that matter, so did Jackson. He explicitly signed on with the movie because it had such a goofy title and pushed back against efforts to retitle it to something a bit more sensible. But that’s no surprise. We all know that, in his heart of hearts, Jackson’s one of us, too.