The changing landscape of SNL and its impact on movie stardom

Actually, this is a cute story. We met on a golf course in Scotland when we were- Get off the shed! How about next Sunday? Pebble Brook, 12 o'clock tee-off time. This was a historic moment for Saturday Night Live, but not in a good way. On September 30, 1995, Will Ferrell debuted as an SNL cast member. He became a main player and used his newfound fame to propel himself into bona fide movie stardom like so many of his castmates before him. So what's so bad about that? Well, September 30, 1995 might have marked the beginning of Ferrell's career, but it also denoted the end of an era. It was the last time Saturday Night Live ever produced a movie star. Drive a Dodge Stratus! When Lorne Michaels first conceptualized Saturday Night Live for NBC, he envisioned a politically savvy and culturally relevant sketch comedy show that touched on the issues of the day while still standing the test of time. He needed a solid stable of comedians. By the time the show premiered on October 11, 1975, he had found what he was looking for. The original SNL cast consisted of Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Garrett Morris, Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, John Belushi, and Lorraine Newman. They were dubbed the Not Ready for Primetime Players as a direct response to their competition, Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell. But in a hilarious twist of fate, it was our beloved SNL cast that would really steal the spotlight. Oh, Robert, there will certainly be a lot of swinging in our Bachelor 5 tonight. The show swiftly cemented itself as an American cultural touchstone, and its cast enjoyed the perks of that status. Two years in, they even poached one of Howard Cosell's primetime players when Bill Murray joined the team. As it turned out, Murray, Chase, Aykroyd, and Belushi were not only ready for primetime, they were ready for the silver screen. All four actors rose through the ranks as leading men in well-regarded comedies throughout the late 70s, 80s, and even into the 90s. These men weren't just making movies. They were shaping what comedy films could be and morphing into massive celebrities in the process. While John Belushi tragically passed in 1982, and Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, and Bill Murray's movie careers leveled out in the mid-90s, SNL was far from finished when it came to making movie stars. While the popularity of SNL itself waxed and waned over the years, its cast remained popular. Beginning with Animal House in 1978 and ending with Tropic Thunder and Step Brothers in 2008, at least one movie starring an SNL cast member could be found near the top of ticket sales or critical reception every year for an astounding 30 years. Yeah, baby! And it wasn't just full cast members that found fame through SNL. Those who showed up as special guests like Steve Martin and Jim Carrey ended up as hot Hollywood commodities, meaning that even today, the show's legacy stars are still drawing crowds in movie theaters. But the key word there is legacy, because it's been decades since the culturally relevant sketch comedy show actually contributed to relevant culture. It's been a real drag! Thanks for nothing! Will Ferrell was the last of the true movie stars to come out of Saturday Night Live in 1995. And with the show celebrating its 50th anniversary in 2025, it's become even more glaring just how much times have changed. If you're viewing the show through nostalgia-tinted lenses, you might be keen to say it's because it just hasn't been good for the last 20 years. But things are a little more complicated than that. Back in the show's heyday, Universal Pictures took a bit of a chance on Saturday Night Live by doing something virtually unheard of. They agreed to finance a movie based on one of the show's most iconic skits, the real-life musical act, The Blues Brothers. The movie hit theaters in 1980 and made $115 million off a budget of just $27 million. This move to the big screen helped to legitimize SNL as an entertainment institution. They're not gonna catch us. We're on a mission from God. And since Rising Tides lift all ships, it also legitimized its cast members' careers. Unfortunately, not all of SNL's subsequent forays into film were quite as successful. While 1992's Wayne's World was another smash hit, the majority of the show's movie catalog failed to make its budget back. 1993's Coneheads, 1994's It's Pat, and 2000's Ladies' Man are particular standouts in that shameful arena. Luckily, the cast wasn't restricted to starring exclusively in SNL movies. They were free to pursue other projects, which is what many of them did. The big names in that 30-year-long golden age were relentless in their quest to make audiences laugh, and they helped to bring about a sort of comedy movie renaissance. In some cases, like with Adam Sandler, they practically created their own subgenres based entirely around their name and unique comedic style. The age of the comedy renaissance, however, is long gone. Not so coincidentally, it started to fizzle out in the early 2000s, and was effectively over by the mid-2010s. This is the point at which movie studios moved away from mid-budget comedies and simple concepts to focus on films with much grander scopes. It's bullshit, and I'm sorry. And I'm not putting it on your profession, but it's just the way I feel. They went with higher-risk projects in hopes of seeing higher returns. Both Iron Man and The Dark Knight came out in 2008. They changed the tide of audience expectations, and they started to gravitate to longer, grittier, and more spectacular movies for the price of their ticket. Even the comedies had to be full of complex stunts and action sequences. The SNL actors who had built their careers off of family vacation films, simple spy parodies, and more traditional comedies found themselves homeless in a Hollywood structure they had helped build. And in more recent years, we've only strayed further away from those roots. Taking a look at newer releases, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything resembling the comedies of old between the 10,000th Marvel movie, highbrow horror flick, or fast-paced addition to an established action franchise. This shift in the industry is further proven by the fact that Saturday Night Live hasn't put out its own movie since MacGruber in 2010, which was a total financial bomb. And that's not the only technical glitch in SNL's movie star production line. The birth and popularity of the internet had a significant impact on, well, everything. Stay off the internet. Yeah, that's a good idea. Before people could curate their own highly specific online presence, America essentially operated as a monoculture where just about everyone knew the same celebrities and consumed the same entertainment. Nowadays, there are an endless amount of subcultural niches with their own insular fan bases, and hundreds of hours worth of content are being uploaded every second of the day to various platforms. It's no longer a guarantee that your co-workers will have watched the same TV show or gone to see the same movie you did over the weekend. The rise of streaming services meant that prestige television and movies were suddenly available to be paused and played at the viewer's whim. Now we're inundated with high-caliber entertainment and we don't have to set foot in a movie theater to see it. Even the best and most pervasive media in the new digital age can be quickly consumed on a phone screen. You think you've seen a film on your f***ing telephone. Get real. Which makes our once-larger-than-life stars feel small. There's just too much competition for a potential audience's attention, and that's not to say that Saturday Night Live is dead. Obviously, while many members of the cast aren't movie stars, they have carved their way into respectable careers as writers, producers, voice actors, and television mainstays. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are the two most obvious examples. Others, like Andy Samberg, have embraced the streaming era and started movies specifically made for online consumption. And in the more modern seasons of SNL, just about every cast member has a podcast or other online presence where their millions of fans can go to support them. So while SNL might not be the star-making factory it once was, it hasn't fallen completely out of favor. Rather, our idea of what a star even is has changed in the 50 years since the show first aired, and the cast's approach to stardom has necessarily changed along with it. Whether that change is a positive one is up to personal interpretation, though it probably wouldn't hurt to start putting out a few mid-budget comedy movies again.