MacGruber Made $9 Million and Died in Theaters. It Was the Funniest Thing Will Forte Ever Did
A movie based on a 90-second SNL sketch lasted three weeks in theaters in 2010. Eleven years later it came back as a TV show. A thing that refuses to die is either a zombie or a classic.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min read
In May of 2010, a movie called MacGruber opened in theaters. It made about $4 million its first weekend and about $9 million all told, against a budget of around $10 million, and then it left theaters in three weeks, quietly, like a man leaving a wedding before the toasts. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 48 percent. Audiences gave it a C-minus on CinemaScore, which is the grade you get for showing up and spelling your name right.
Now, it was based on a Saturday Night Live sketch, and that sketch was a minute and a half long, and the joke of the sketch was that a man who is supposed to defuse bombs keeps getting distracted, and the bomb goes off. That's the whole thing. People said you couldn't stretch that into a movie. They were right, in the sense that people are usually right about the wrong thing.
Because what Will Forte did, with Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe and the director Jorma Taccone, was not stretch the joke. He made the character worse. MacGruber in the film is vain, cowardly, petty, and absolutely sure he's the hero of an eighties action picture. He has no idea the movie around him is laughing. That's the hardest kind of comedy there is, the kind where the man in it never once winks, and Forte never winks. I've seen men wink at funerals. Forte wouldn't wink in a sandstorm.
The film's reputation grew the slow way, on home video, passed from one fan to another like a rumor about a good diner. By 2021, there were enough of those fans that Peacock brought the whole thing back as an eight-episode series, and critics, who had given the movie a 48, gave the show an 85. That's not a comeback. That's an apology.
I'll grant the other side its point. It's crude, it's loud, and if you don't laugh at the first scene, you won't laugh at the last one, and you'll want your two hours back. But a comedy that flopped, got buried, and came back on its own strength is not a mistake. It's a slow cooker. Some dishes you can't rush, and some movies you have to let sit for ten years before anyone admits they were delicious.