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“The monster movies, I saw pretty much all of them. I Married a Monster from Outer Space or Creature from the Black Lagoon, lots of Dracula, Frankenstein, The Blob. And the Japanese movies, the Godzillas and the Mothras and all those things. Everybody wants to run from a monster,” Jackson recalled to Vulture of his connection to campy films. “So I end up doing something like Deep Blue Sea ’cause it was like, ‘Okay, I’m running from a monster. It’s a big-ass shark, but I’m running from it.’ When I heard about Snakes on a Plane, I had just done Formula 51 with the director. So I called him, was like, ‘Are you going to do a movie called Snakes on a Plane? Is it what I think it is?’ He’s like, ‘Yes, it’s a plane full of poisonous snakes turned loose.’ I’m like, ‘Oh sh-t, can I be in that?’”
He continued, “So he called New Line, New Line was excited. I signed on and then I don’t know what happened. In the midst of all that, the director got fired. I was like, ‘Oh, well I’m still going to do it. F-ck that.’ When I got there, they were trying to change the name of it to something like Pacific Flight 121, ”Cause we don’t want to give it away.’ I was like, ‘That’s exactly what you want to do! Hell is wrong with you? I signed up for Snakes on a Plane and I guarantee you that audiences will be way more excited about Snakes on a Plane than Pacific Flight 121.’”
As soon as news began to circulate about Samuel L. Jackson starring in a film titled “Snakes on a Plane,” memes circulated that wished Jackson would embrace his R-rated lines of dialogue from other films, specifically hoping for the line, “I have had it with these motherf-cking snakes on this motherf-cking plane!” The buzz was so strong that the studio then shot more scenes to take the film from a PG-13 experience to earn an R, including Jackson delivering the requested line.
Similar to how studios aimed to cash in on internet clout with a re-release last year’s Morbius, Snakes on a Plane confirmed that internet buzz doesn’t translate to box-office success, as the project failed to make much of an impact when it was released. Even without much impact initially, the movie inspired other studios to pursue projects that intentionally leaned into absurdity and campiness.
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