Anchorman Made $90 Million. It's Still a Sketch That Lost Its Plot to a Panda
Will Ferrell's 2004 newsroom comedy is the most quoted movie of its decade. That's exactly the problem with it.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy came out in the summer of 2004, made about $90.6 million worldwide on a $26 million budget, and gave every office in America a man who would not stop quoting it. The reviews at the time were mixed, 66% on Rotten Tomatoes and a 63 on Metacritic. Since then it has risen to cult status, which is what happens to a movie when the people who loved it in college get old enough to write about movies.
Everything it's owed, it gets here. Will Ferrell is a genius of a specific kind, the kind who can make vanity look like a medical condition. Adam McKay made his directing debut and wrote it with Ferrell, and Judd Apatow produced. The news team is as good a comic ensemble as that decade produced, Vince Vaughn is a fine rival anchor, and the cameos, Ben Stiller, Tim Robbins, Luke Wilson and Jack Black among them, arrive like relatives at a wake, each one eating more than his share of the sandwiches.
But look at how the thing was built. The original movie was about a band of hippie bank robbers called the Alarm Clock. It tested badly, so the filmmakers reshot much of it around a panda story, and the leftover footage was stitched into a second film, Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie, which went straight to DVD that December. That isn't a plot. That's a hostage negotiation with a test audience, and the panda walked out with the money.
The result is a movie made of scenes rather than a movie with scenes in it. The street fight between rival news teams is a sketch. The jazz flute is a sketch. The bear pit at the end is a sketch with a dog in it. Each one is funny, and each one could be lifted out and dropped into a different movie without anybody noticing, which is a wonderful quality in a sofa and a poor one in a screenplay.
There's also Veronica Corningstone, played by Christina Applegate and modeled on Jessica Savitch, the pioneering network anchor. The movie's whole argument is that the men are dinosaurs and she's smarter than every one of them, which is true and is said out loud several times. Then the third act sends her into a bear enclosure so the dinosaur can jump in after her. Progress, in 1970s San Diego and 2004 Hollywood alike, apparently still needed a man to hold the ladder.
And then there's the quoting. Anchorman ranked 49th on Rolling Stone's list of the century's best films, and its real legacy is less the film than the fellow in accounting who says one line from it at every meeting, the way a parrot outlives its owner and keeps repeating his last request. A quote is a joke with its context removed, and this movie was built to be taken apart, so it was. You don't remember what Anchorman is about. Nobody does. That's because, after the reshoots, it mostly isn't.
The sequel in 2013 opened to $26.2 million and confirmed the method: more scenes, less movie. Anchorman is funny, and nobody sane argues otherwise. It's just a very good party that everybody mistook for a house. Fame works the same on a movie as on a man: the more people repeat you, the less anybody remembers what you actually said.