O snake haterz, how quickly you forsake the ones you love. SoaP was #1 at the box office this weekend, just as I predicted more than a year ago. Yet everywhere I see nothing but cries of defeat.

Excuse me? If you told me back in March 2005 that Pacific Air Flight 151 Snakes on a Plane was really actually going to be the #1 movie in America rather than just *deserving* to be I'd have told you that you were out of your mind. SoaP's budget was either $3M, $33M, or $36M million depending on who you talk to. Assuming that Fox News is full of shit as usual that still means SoaP made back 40% of its production budget, which is not bad but at least in the ballpark compared to the most successful blockbusters of all time:

Blair Witch Project	486%	29.2/0.06
Jurassic Park	74%	47/63
Phantom Menace	55%	64/115
Spider Man 2	44%	88.1/200
Snakes on a Plane	40%	13.8/34.5
Battlefield Earth	15.7%	11.5/73
Titanic	14.3%	28.6/200
Gigli	6.8%	3.7/54

The real criticism goes to New Line, who spent $60 million marketing the movie. WHY? You either want to see this movie or you don't. Would you spend $60 million marketing water to a market where 20% are dying of thirst? No, you wouldn't. You'd spend ZERO on marketing beyond the barest minimum of ads telling people where to buy your water, because people either have water or they don't.

So was it a good movie? The movie's surrealistically honest marketing makes that point entirely moot. Were you promised snakes on a plane? Yes you were. Were there snakes on that plane? Yes there were. If you ask for snakes on a plane and you complain about getting a plane with snakes on it the Romans had a phrase for people like you.

I'm going to start posting my SOAP-related content over in the snakesonablog group. If you want to know about snakes, planes, or Samuel Jackson please start looking over there.

The movie isn't even done yet but already there are reviews coming in. snakesonablog2 (not to be confused with snakesonablog) features fabfunk's review of the January 2005 version of the Snakes on a Plane script. Warning: Spoilers! And snakes! (Oops, that was another spoiler.)

Samuel Jackson is doing a publicity tour for Freedomland, and was just interviewed on All Things Considered where he mentioned Snakes On A Plane (at 10:40).

Snakes on a Plane is, uh, pretty much what it sounds like. I wanted to do films sometimes that excited me when I was a kid and I always liked horror and adventure movies, and when I opened the cover on that particular script and it said "Snakes on a Plane" I was immediately viscerally struck with it. Oh yeah. It turned out to be exactly what I thought. Somebody turns loose a big crateload of poisonous snakes on an airplane and we have to fight the snakes until we get to our destination. It's just one of those popcorn kind of moments where you know you're goin' to a movie, you don't have to think about what's happening, you know what's gonna happen. There are going to be snakes loose on this plane, some people are going to get bitten, there's gonna be some victims, and you hope you're a survivor. You just want to have that experience and excite people who are sittin' there watchin' it. People who are afraid of flying and afraid of snakes are going to have like a double-whammy goin' with that. It's kinda going to be great.

By "Kinda going to be great" I'm sure he means "Best movie ever".

If you can't wait until August 18th an astute reader pointed me to "Scorpions on a Plane", aka Tail Sting.

Talk about terror at 25,000 feet! Genetically enhanced scorpions are smuggled aboard a plane en route to Los Angeles, and things get out of hand when the nasty insects break out of their cryogenic prison and begin to grow into deadly, bloodthirsty killers. The passengers of the flight must arm themselves as the pilot tries to guide their crippled plane to a safe landing. Parachute, anyone?

(See IMDB, Netflix, review.)

Update: Yes, scorpions are arachnids not insects. It's a quote. I did not write it, Captain Linnaeus.

There's now a Snakes On a Plane Comic.

I am now a loyal daily reader. Huzzah.

LJ-syndicated as soapcomic. So it turns out the RSS feed is for the comics on any particular comic. NOT the comics as a whole. Which is too bad: I don't care about comments but I'd love a syndicated feed for *all* the comics.

Dear Eric Steuer c/o Wired Magazine,

Stupid name? Perhaps you failed to understand Josh Friedman's summary of the appeal best movie title of all time.

Snakes on a Plane. Holy shit, I'm thinking. It's a title. It's a concept. It's a poster and a logline and whatever else you need it to be. It's perfect. Perfect. It's the Everlasting Gobstopper of movie titles.
...
There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane. What else do you need to know? How the snakes get on the plane, what the snakes do once they're on the plane, who puts the snakes on the plane, who is trying to get the snakes off the plane...This is not for you to ponder. There are snakes on the plane. End of fucking story.

"Snakes on a Plane" is not "bad". It's not even "so bad it's good". It is "so good that it remains good" which isn't even a cliché. "Snakes on a Plane" has the poetic simple beauty of the finest minimalist art. Its timelessness expresses all that you need to know. There are SNAKES. There is a PLANE. That is ALL ANYONE NEEDS TO KNOW. You can't judge a movie by its title, but you can judge a title by its title and this title is GOLD.

Where the hell does a magazine with an outdated title like "Wired" get off making pronouncements about what titles are and are not cool anyway? If "Wired" had a fraction of the simple honesty that makes "Snakes on a Plane" such elegant genius they'd call their publication "Idiots Who Can't Identify Popular Trends on a Magazine Everyone Stopped Taking Seriously When I Was In High School". In the immortal words of Bill O'Reilly if terrorists come in there and fill up Wired's lobby with dangerous snakes Samuel Jackson isn't going to do anything about it. You want to subject Conde Nast to scaly cold-blooded herpetological terror? Go ahead.

Sincerely,
tongodeon

From the context a "Snaxel" appears to be "adjacent points on a snake", where a snake is an "Euler path in the d-hypercube that has no chords". Apparently there's been a lot of research in the fields of mathematics to describe the complex interaction between snakes and planes.

In the first verse of It's the End of the World As We Know It:

That's great, it starts with an earthquake, birds and snakes, an aeroplane Lenny Bruce is not afraid.

Someone recently asked "so why is this funny? is it because you keep repeating it over and over? the repetition is funny?"

For me it's got nothing to do with the repetition. "Snakes on a Plane" was funny back in January before anyone else knew about it, back when it was "Pacific Air 121". It's the mental image of Samuel Jackson stuck on a plane with snakes - not as one single scene, but as the premise for an entire fucking movie. And the surrealistically honest marketing of the film (at Jackson's apparent insistence) to be exactly that.

Try a thought experiment. Take "Titanic", which is not funny, and call it "Teenagers On A Boat" - that's kinda funny. Add Samuel Jackson and some snakes and call it "Snakes On A Boat" it's a little more funny. Then change the boat to a plane and for some reason it turns to GOLD.

I can't really explain it, but for some reason this movie just works in the worst and best way possible, simultaneously.

Dave Cassel is pimping Snakes on a Plane. Michael Bay leaks his treatment of the script. YankeeFog has also posted two must-read articles.

If you are like most Americans, you are probably asking yourself, "How can I educate myself about the important issue of snakes on a plane?" Fortunately, New Line Cinema has prepared an educational film on this very subject, starring Samuel L. Jackson.

At great personal risk, we here at Yankee Fog have obtained an exclusive sneak look at the trailer for the upcoming prestige film Snakes On A Plane. We are pleased to present you, our readers, with a complete and unedited transcript.

VOICE OVER: In a world where snakes can get on a plane...

FADE IN ON: An airline check-in counter. The TICKET LADY is stamping somebody's ticket.

On the other side of the ticket counter is the passenger: a snake. In an effort to look more human, the snake is wearing a false moustache and an old-fashioned bowler hat.

TICKET LADY: Enjoy the flight, Mr...
(CHECKING THE NAME ON THE TICKET) Snakerson.

THE SNAKE: Sssssssss.

I swear to God, the week before August 18th I'm going to be camping out in front of Mann's Chinese Theater dressed either as a snake or as a plane.

#1 movie of next summer, guaranteed.



(Via creepyanonymous)

Snakes on an Oil Rig is not the sequel to Snakes On A Plane. Yet. (via snopes_dot_com)

A few months ago I mentioned Snakes On A Plane. Alas, that was just the working title for a movie named "Pacific Air Flight 121". At least it was a working title until Samuel Jackson said put his big black foot down and insisted what fans already know: that the "Snakes on a Plane" title was GOLD.

Beaks: One of those films that you’re working on right now is... well, it’s called "Pacific Air 121"—
Jackson: Snakes on a Plane, man!
Beaks: Exactly.
Jackson: We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.
Beaks: Snakes on a Plane! That’s everything!
Jackson: You either want to see that, or you don’t.

Damn straight, Samuel. "Snakes on a Plane" fans will also be excited to see "photos on a website".