MacGruber SNL Skit to Become Big Screen Feature
According to Production Weekly, Jorma Taccone will direct the MacGruber film.
Taccone is one third of the sketch comedy troupe The Lonely Island along with childhood friends Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer. He recently starred in this summer’s comedy Land of the Lost as Chaka.
The MacGruber sketches starred Will Forte as MacGyver’s son with Wiig as an assistant who always find themselves, along with that week’s guest star, in a control room with a ticking bomb about to go off. MacGruber gets sidelined by personal issues, and the bomb goes off.
Also Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer are in talks to star in a big-screen adaptation of the MacGruber sketch from Saturday Night Live that is a riff off of the 80’s TV show MacGyver.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Will Forte and Kristen Wiig are reprising their roles from the skits for the Paramount and Relativity Media production.
Forte and Taccone wrote the parodies with John Solomon. The trio wrote the feature script, which takes the story in a completely different direction from the skits yet remains strangely familiar: The legendary, much decorated MacGruber is pulled out of retirement as a monk in Ecuador by a colonel, who needs him once more to fight on behalf of his country. This time the mission involves going up against the evil Cunth, who has a nuclear warhead; the mission is personal because Cunth killed MacGruber’s bride.
The movie version would see Phillippe playing Piper, an Army officer forced to pair up with a reluctant MacGruber. Kilmer would be Cunth. MacGruber movie is fast-tracked and at this stage looks like it could make it to the screen before a MacGyver movie, which is in development at New Line.
Sounds a lot like Ace Ventura meets Austin Powers by way of MacGuyver. I do not watch SNL but have seen these skits and they are funny. The skit has somewhat of a cult following with a Super Bowl Pepsi commercial using the MacGruber skit to sell their product. I wonder if Richard Dean Anderson will cameo in the film?
I also wonder how this is going to affect the MacGyver remake that was announced a few months ago.
