It’s The Big Chill meets Anaconda. At least that’s how writer/director Tom Gormican and co-writer Kevin Etten pitched the project to Sony, who they didn’t believe would actually greenlight it. The team behind the meta Nicolas Cage flick The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent now had the responsibility of rebooting a cheesy horror film from the 1990s which grossed over $136 million, and so they took the meta route here too.
“The challenge was to find a way in that felt kind of clever or different and wasn't like a traditional remake or reboot,” Gormican said in an interview with Polygon. “We make fun of the idea of reboots.”
Gormican, who said he was a big fan of the original, decided to subvert the genre of Anaconda and reboot it in a world where the original exists, and the lead characters were big fans of it too. The movie idea, now self-aware, could change the concept of a horror film about a stalking killer snake into a comedy about a group of people going through a midlife crisis longing for the days when they were kids making movies with a VHS recorder.
How the Characters Helped Change 'Anaconda'
In the original 1997 film, a documentary crew travels along the Amazon River in search of an indigenous tribe. Instead, the team finds a stranded snake hunter who joins them and shares the lore of the anaconda as a protector of the tribe they’re seeking out. Chaos ensues when a massive anaconda decides to stalk and kill them.
The 2025 version is a bit different.
Longtime friends Doug (Jack Black), Griff (Paul Rudd), Claire (Thandiwe Newton) and Kenny (Steve Zahn) have grown apart and are all going through a midlife crisis. Doug does wedding videos but dreams bigger, Griff is a struggling actor who wants more, Claire is a lawyer going through a divorce and Kenny… well, he’s just trying to get by. They reunite at Doug’s birthday party when Griff reveals a VHS tape of a movie they all made when they were kids. This reignites a passion for shooting a movie; specifically, rebooting Anaconda, which they all loved when they were kids.
All of that puts the film on a much different, and more comedic trajectory, than the original film. It becomes less about survival and more about finding themselves in a place they have no business being. In fact, Gormican says he was inspired by movies like City Slickers - a 1990s comedy about 3 man-children going through a midlife crisis, but City Slickers is nothing like a reptilian-based horror movie.
We Love the 90s
Every decade gets its nostalgic period, and we’re currently in the ‘fond memories of the 1990s’ era. From movies like Y2K and Captain Marvel to TV shows like Derry Girls and Yellowjackets, the 90s are getting a lot of love.
It’s only natural that a self-aware reboot/re-imagining of the 1997 movie references that decade and some hit songs. This includes hits like I Like Big Butts by Sir Mix-a-Lot, I Don’t Want to Wait by Paula Cole, famously the theme song to Dawson’s Creek, and End of the Road by Boyz II Men.
As teenagers, the four mid-lifers made a movie on a VHS camera. Titled Quatch, it was inspired by Martin Scorcese and Quentin Tarantino and was about a killer sasquatch. The catalyst to the adventure is Griff bringing a VHS copy of Quatch to Doug’s birthday.
“Audiences are just tired of not seeing original stories,” Gormican said in an interview with Variety. “It’s been a decade of, ‘Here’s some remakes of stuff that you used to love,’ and there’s a limit to people’s nostalgia.”
Anaconda plays on people’s nostalgia by directly referencing it. This is the wink to the audience by filmmakers who know that sequels, prequels and reboots seem to be the only thing Hollywood is producing, and even though they are doing just that, it’s their way of building rapport with the audience.
Exposition: How to Make it Obvious and Entertaining
Where does Doug and Griff’s passion to make movies come from? And what’s going on in Claire's life?
While exposition is a way to share information, it can be hard to do it in a movie and make it interesting without being obvious.
Anaconda does it in a super obvious way though, leaning on the concept of creating DVD extras to get the audience up-to-date. A quick montage at the beginning of the adventure involves ‘behind-the-scenes’ interviews with the cast and crew as they give information about their background, why they’re embarking on this adventure and some history regarding the friends’ dynamic.
Exposition has its challenges, but Anaconda shows how to accomplish it in an entertaining way.
“We came here to make 'Anaconda' and now we’re in it” - Doug
Anaconda starts off as a comedy but consistently flips genres. In fact, you could probably label it a comedy/horror/drama/action-adventure film.
In the Variety interview, Gormican describes Anaconda as a “buddy movie that becomes an adventure film that becomes an action film that becomes a horror film.”
“Kevin Etten and I didn’t really want to play in someone else’s sandbox or world. To me, that felt wrong. But at the same time, we make off-the-wall comedies that mix genres, and it’s very, very difficult to get something comedic made now,” Gormican said in an interview with Yahoo. “So that was part of the calculation. We were like, ‘How do you do that without comic IP?’ So that led us down the road of making [Anaconda] funnier.”
Comedy is increasingly scarce in the modern film industry. Anaconda demonstrates that broad comedy today can’t stand on its own, and is more often than not blended with other genres. The filmmakers understood that to reboot or reimagine a movie, they needed to shake things up while still respecting the core of the original idea.
Other recent examples include:
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air – this sitcom from the 1990s became Bel-Air, a rebooted drama
- 21 Jump Street - a cop drama on TV that became a successful action-comedy feature film and spawned a sequel.
Ultimately, it’s the filmmaker’s responsibility to set and meet audience expectations. Sony aimed to reboot Anaconda, and Gormican and Etten recognized that nostalgia and comedy were effective ways to rework the IP while subverting the original genre. While audiences might expect a traditional creature feature centered on a stalking anaconda, the filmmakers realized the best way to meet, and play with, those expectations was to embrace the premise’s campiness and have fun with it.