SNL Movies, ranked
A list that is neither timely nor relevant.
Saturday Night Live doesn't return until October, and the slow trickle of announcements or leaks about the various cast members who won't be returning is pretty depressing, even if I'm the only person who immediately knows who "Michael Longfellow" is when I see the headline "Michael Longfellow fired from SNL."
SNL is possibly the single most formative comedy influence on my life, and I am absolutely that person who still watches every week and laughs at most of the stuff in it, just prior to reading that everyone on Bluesky hated the episode, as per usual. I'm grateful for Jesse David Fox and the team over at Vulture, and my former coworker Mike Ryan, all of whom do their part to keep the SNL appreciation machine rolling with the proper mixture of objectivity and adoration.
Last year's 50th anniversary of the show brought a lot of deserved goodwill, and was also accompanied by the miles-better-than-it-had-any-right-to-be (or maybe actually-as-good-as-the-filmmakers-attached-would-suggest) quasi-Lorne Michaels biopic Saturday Night. There were oodles of celebrations and specials, and a spectacular series of hyper-specific documentaries on Peacock, all of which I heartily recommend.
But one quirk of the SNL universe – one that was in its fullest bloom during my formative years – has fallen fallow in recent years. And of course, I'm talking about the SNL movie. And by that I mean a true, honest-to-god SNL movie: a movie about and featuring a recurring character from the show. There have been two Lonely Island movies and one Please Don't Destroy movie, but those aren't SNL movies; they're just movies starring SNL people. And those have been many and varied, from Bridesmaids to Anchorman to Billy Madison to Spies Like Us to Neighbors. Those don't count.
Presented here proudly is my full, definitive ranking of the official, canonical SNL movies.
No. 11: It's Pat
Oofa doofa, what a calamity. Arguably the least necessary of the entire lot (all of the bottom three have an argument), it also feels like a movie that was destined to age like raw milk in Death Valley. I'm glad that Julia Sweeney got to star in a movie, but at what cost?
Well, actually, I'll tell you what cost: $8 million. You know what It's Pat grossed against its $8 million budget? Sixty thousand dollars. The moviegoing public overwhelmingly, unanimously decided that it was not time for androgyny, and there goes Pat.
