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What the world really needs is a Super Fans movie

Kim Hollis: MacGruber made $4.0 million over the weekend, with a per location average of $1,585. Say something funny about MacGruber (and make yourself the envy of the Saturday Night Live writers).

Tom Houseman: Looks like somebody needs to make MacGruber a life saving invention! Ba-zing! Unlike its protagonist, it doesn't look like MacGruber's box office number is going to explode! Hey-oh! With the exception of a single episode hosted by Betty White, SNL has been irrelevant for more than a decade! Wait, that one made me sad...

To play devil's advocate, I'd like to point out that Office Space opened larger than Mac's number at $4.2 million, and ended up with about $10 million, equal to its production budget. The point that I'm making is that plenty of comedies have underperformed at the box office and then become cult hits on video. Mackers (I think saying this movie's name in theaters will soon become a curse) also has a budget of $10 million, and while I haven't seen it and therefore can't judge its quality, I wouldn't be too surprised if it became a minor cult hit.





Daron Aldridge: Couldn't NBC/Universal taken the $10 million budget (plus God knows how much advertising money they threw away) and invested in just one more season of Law & Order to give it the longest-running drama record? I know this isn't funny...just bitter. Even the lowest performing "spoof" movies as of late opened better - Disaster Movie opened with $6.9 million and Superhero Movie opened with $9.5 million. I reckon this was the perfect storm of suckitude with Will Forte, the expected stink of an SNL movie, and its "edgy" R rating.

Josh Spiegel: I'd agree with Tom; in five years' time, if this isn't some kind of cult hit, I'll be shocked. I'm surprised the movie made so little money; though SNL movies never do that well, the show's ratings were pretty high recently and not without their mentions of MacGruber. Also, I've seen plenty of ads for it, so the marketing was pretty solid. This is just one of those movies that no one's dying to see (insert MacGruber dying in exploding building joke here).

Matthew Huntley: MacGruber? More like MacGr-WHO?-ber, because it seemed like no moviegoers weren't even aware of this guy. (Wow, that was a really bad joke on my part - sorry.) Speaking of bad jokes, though, I think the primary reason this movie failed was because none of the trailers/TV spots were amusing. The movie carries an R-rating, and the reviews were halfway decent, but it seems Universal succumbed to the same problems with MacGruber as Sony did with Walk Hard - the really good stuff was probably too vile and raunchy to advertise, so they had to throw in the lame stuff. The potential solution would be to either: a) trim the movie down to a PG-13 rating (which would also open up the audience base); b) not have lame, unfunny jokes to begin with; or c) all of the above. Just like Shrek, perhaps it's time SNL hung up its movie-making hat.

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