There are only a few things I’ve ever been sure of in this world: 1. that Margot Robbie was robbed of a Best Actress Oscar for her work on I, Tonya; 2. that when I die, they’re gonna cut me open and find a congealed wad of Diet Coke the exact size and weight of a bowling ball; and 3. that one day, I was going to have to write about Snakes on a Plane for this Substack.
And since this seminal piece of “Samuel L. Jackson cusses out a bunch of reptiles” cinema turns 20 on August 18, it seems that day has finally arrived!
Of course, I am not here to write about the actual movie. Like the vast majority of people who got marginally swept up in Snakes on a Plane-mania, I never actually saw it. Why would I need to?? For a whole year, from August 2005 to the film’s actual 2006 release, I saw something far better: the internet’s deranged, focused and extremely prolonged outpouring of attention towards the film, based only on the title and star Samuel L. Jackson’s involvement.
In 2006, fan fiction had already existed for decades, pioneered by Star Trek fans in the 1960s. Nerds using the internet to butt into the production of films had also been around for a few years, most notably during the making of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films.
But the frenzy around Snakes on a Plane was different. Not just because of its scale, though that was part of it — in June 2006, the Los Angeles Times reported that there were almost 3.8 million references to the film online, at a time when only 84 million Americans had reliable internet service at home.
But the real difference was that this was the opposite of protective fans safeguarding their favorite properties. Instead, a bunch of people, enraptured by the silliness of the title, entered some kind of shared online dream state, and spent countless hours creatively riffing on what they thought the movie could or should be. It wasn’t necessarily fueled by love, though I’m sure some participants thought the movie would be great. It also wasn’t fueled by disdain, though that was in the mix, too (see: the January 2006 Wired report that dubbed it the “best worst movie of the year” and claimed that the fan attention “all but clinches the would-be dud’s place in the camp classics hall of fame”).
Rather, Snakes on a Plane mania seemed to exist at a weird intersection where nascent absurdist online humor, nascent social media culture, and nascent online fan culture crossed paths with old media, creating a bizarre alliance that in the end seemed to make no one happy and was never repeated.
To me, there’s only one question that ever truly matters in historical research: what the fuck was that about? I’m still not totally sure what the fuck this whole chapter of internet culture was about. But I do think it had more of an impact than any of us would think.
“Snakes on a Brain”
The story of Snakes on a Plane begins in the ‘90s, when original screenwriter David Dalessandro (an administrator at the University of Pittsburgh) wrote a serious screenplay called Venom, after watching a documentary about snakes hiding in the cargo holds of WWII planes. As he told the Pittsburgh Vindicator in 2006,“I thought, ‘What if the snake got loose on the plane?‘”
I mean, who among us hasn’t wondered exactly that! Dalessandro began to circulate his script; a summary note from an executive gave the film its better-known title.
And then, for a bunch of years, nothing happened. According to John Heffernan, who wrote the final version of the script, 9/11 turned people off from air disaster movies. But by 2004, we had healed as a nation and were once again ready to be entertained by plane crashes. And so, Snakes on a Plane began production.
The online obsession with Snakes on a Plane began with an August 2005 exchange on Collider.com between a writer named “Mr. Beaks” and Samuel L. Jackson, which introduced the two key elements of the mythos: 1. the film’s title and 2. Samuel L. Jackson’s PASSIONATE enthusiasm for said title:
“Beaks: One of those films that you’re working on right now is... well, it’s called ‘Pacific Air 121’—
Jackson: Snakes on a Plane, man!
Beaks: Exactly.
Jackson: We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.
Beaks: Snakes on a Plane! That’s everything!
Jackson: You either want to see that, or you don’t.
The topic then resurfaced a few days later on Blogspot, which seems to have kicked the fan fixation into high gear. In a post entitled “Snakes on a Motherfucking Plane,” screenwriter Josh Friedman tells the tale of being offered a punch-up gig on a script called Snakes on a Plane — a title that immediately sets his mind atwitter:
“I ask Agent the name of the project, what it's about, etc. He says: Snakes on a Plane. Holy shit, I'm thinking. It's a title. It's a concept. It's a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It's perfect. Perfect. It's the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.
Soon after, Friedman takes a meeting with the studio, where he praises the title, and they immediately tell him they are changing it to something less goofy. Who will pay money to see a movie called Snakes on a Plane? Friedman doesn’t get the rewrite job, naturally.
But in a way, he does. Because in describing the film, he becomes the first person to associate Jackson’s legendarily foul-mouthed persona with the project: “As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane.”
He also put in place one of the key elements of Snake mania: The Man wants this movie to be tame and tasteful. But cool rebels get that this movie is supposed to actually be INSANE!
And so, participating in Snakes fan culture wasn’t just a way to make friends online or kill time at your desk job; by pushing for this movie to be as silly and over-the-top as possible, you’re actually striking blows against the Empire!
With all of this in place, people were off to the races! There was an explosion of fan-made media on MySpace and the then-new YouTube (which had just started in 2005), which went in wild directions, because there was no story, no characters, nothing to get in the way of pure nonsense-based creativity.
And so, fan-made trailers and songs got as abstract and silly as possible. Most have been erased from the face of the internet, but a few are still around —including this very charming high school version:
There was also a visual art component, as exemplified in this page from fan site SnakesonaBlog.com:
This was the era of corporations misunderstanding internet fandom — a time when Nickelodeon might sue a random artist to make them take down their erotic drawing depicting the Ninja Turtles as a polycule.
But studio New Line played along. They offered a dedicated T-shirt design hub where fans could create licensed shirts; they also sponsored a music contest to have a song included on the film’s Pete Wentz-produced soundtrack (the winner was, naturally, a song called “Snakes on a Brain”). There was a hotline you could call to send a semi-personalized voicemail from Samuel L. Jackson to friends, urging them to see the film.
But most notably, in March 2006, the film’s cast re-assembled to shoot more boobs-n-blood material to get the film the R rating that fans seemed to demand —and, of course, to get Jackson to deliver the expletive-filled line that the internet had so lovingly crafted for him. “I had the luxury to go back and tailor the film exactly like the fans demand and they expect,” director David Ellis told the Los Angeles Times (though producer Toby Emmerich insisted the reshoots had nothing to do with fans, and were simply added because boobs and blood are awesome).
Following a triumphant screening of a clip at San Diego Comic Con, Jackson told the crowd, "I hope that people in Hollywood are paying attention to this phenomenon. Maybe some young filmmakers out there will understand that you can put a premise on the internet and eventually create a film that's all-inclusive."
What Did Anyone Actually Want Out of Snakes on a Plane?
As the Los Angeles Times observed in June 2006, two months before the film’s release, it was still unclear how much of the fan demands that the film be bloodier and sillier were “sincere and how much of it was a desire to propel an already quirky plot over the top.” Unlike with beloved IP, there was no urge to hold anything sacred, and a decent amount of people were probably participating in the Snakes frenzy because they thought it was the dumbest thing they had ever heard.
When the film actually came out, it seemed like almost no one was happy. The studio was pissed that an ultra-hyped film didn’t meet its box office projections. Viewers who had been hoping for something as silly as the fan art were disappointed that it was kind of just a normal action film, but with snakes (co-star Kenan Thompson’s later observation that the filmmakers didn’t understand they they were making a comedy might have something to do with this).
And original screenwriter Dalessandro was also unhappy! Though he was probably the only administrator at the University of Pittsburgh who had their film produced with Samuel L. Jackson that year, he told the Pittsburgh Vindicator, "I wrote a horror-thriller, something like 'Aliens’ on Earth. They turned it into an inside industry joke for Internet fans…They did a good job for what they tried to do...But it's not what it could have been.”
The biggest winner out of the entire thing was musician Gabe Saporta, who had previously gotten some notoriety with emo band Midtown, but kicked his career into high gear as the frontman of electropop band Cobra Starship…who formed to record the film’s theme.
They also starred in a video that suggests that you can sneak a bunch of snakes onto a plane simply by provocatively shaking your Abercrombie button-up at a TSA agent:
Hot Takes on a Plane
So, seriously: what the fuck was that about?
After the film’s relative failure (it earned twice its budget — not bad, but underwhelming for something so hyped), many were eager to discuss how its downfall was in not realizing that the internet was fake. One representative take, from Tyler Casey at OnMilwaukee.com: “It’s one thing to hype something on the Internet, where people with too much spare time and no real ambition (like myself) are free to essentially do whatever. But it’s another for Hollywood types to get suckered in and try and turn SoaP (a fun, bad-ass way to spend your nine bucks) into some symbol of a new age.”
It is true that there hasn’t been this type of open-source film since — though the internet is lousy with semi-anonymous fan-created storytelling, in everything from fan fic to creepypasta to lore-heavy memes, like the fake Scorsese movie Goncharov. The difference, of course, is that no one has been able to convince Scorsese to actually make Goncharov.
But the anticipated brave new world of crowd-sourced films did kind of materialize…in the form of asshole fans with nothing better to do than develop very strong opinions about movies that don’t yet exist, and make it their life’s work to get studios to bend to their wills (e.g. The Last Jedi, etc).
I remember Snakes mania fondly, as an artifact from a moment before the internet was totally corporatized. Back then, a lot of people made things online for the sake of making them, because no one knew how to cash in yet, and sending death threats to someone’s mom because you didn’t like their video was much harder than it is today.
But was Snakes actually…the first sustained mass fan tantrum? My initial urge was to categorize it alongside the mass fan actions that led to the release of Zak Snyder’s Justice League cut or the fan-funded revival of Veronica Mars…but those fan campaigns were just about supporting specific artists. Snakes mania demanded that the studio cater to fans, because they knew better than whoever was at the helm.
And more than any of that, I wonder if Snakes mania was a major turning point in the internet phenomenon of thinking corporations are your friend — that New Line is “cool” because they listened to fans, just like Oreos were “cool” for not advertising on Elon Musk’s Twitter, or Dove was “progressive” for supposedly embracing body positivity, or Allure was “feminist” for banning the word “anti-aging” (while still reviewing anti-aging products, of course).
Remember that? Remember corporations “listening and learning” in the 2010s and early 2020s? And making supposedly “moral” choices that they then all seemed to immediately take back as soon as those choices were no longer popular or lucrative?
I can’t heap the blame for people think AI chatbots are their friends instead of environmentally-damaging corporate marketing tools at the feet of Snakes on a Plane. But I do wonder if it was one of those small moments that made regular people feel like we were in charge, so we barely even noticed when corporations burrowed deeper and deeper into our lives, and gained more and more control, posing as our buddies who just wanted to help us have more fun the entire way.
Or perhaps, as Snakes screenwriter John Heffernan wrote in 2016, the film’s true legacy is in ““Sharknado,” “Lavalantula,” “Piranhacuda”…it’s fair to say that these movies wouldn’t exist without “Snakes on a Plane.”
But hey, why can’t we both be right!
Further reading
-Yes, I am going to be annoying about my book again — whatever, it comes out in a month, you can deal with it! The Midlife Plot Twist is a reported self-help book about how you shouldn’t feel humiliated if you’re in your 40s and you feel like your whole fucking life has fallen apart; you’re in good company! And Publisher’s Weekly called it “a wise, approachable reminder that it’s not too late to start over.” Pre-order anywhere, but if you pre-order from Astoria Bookshop, you will get this sticker designed by moi:
-I never thought of “not spending money” as a retro trend, but Anna North’s deep-dive into what ‘00s “frugalsphere” money influencers are doing today was fascinating.
-Can you connect the current “woke 1” discourse to “quirk chungus” discourse? Ryan Broderick can!
-To the surprise of probably no one, I am a huge Jackass fan. So I found this Jackass history podcast, hosted by Johnny Knoxville and series co-creator/ ‘90s skateboarding scenester Jeff Tremaine, to be a fascinating look not just at the development of the show, but at the subcultures that led these guys to become famous for kicking each other in the balls.
-If we’re just generally discussing exploitation films about snakes, I would be remiss to not mention that there is a gross 1973 film called Sssssss about a guy who turns into a man-snake. The very idea kind of makes me want to throw up, but just in case you like that sort of thing!
Honestly, for me it was the theme. More horrible action movies need theme songs. A lost art.
This is such a great niche deep dive!