Snakes On A Plane was Hollywood's first time misreading social media

Arriving during the early days of memes, the film's spectacular failure to launch still taught Hollywood nothing about the internet.

By Matt Schimkowitz  |  August 10, 2026 | 1:00pm
Photo: New Line Cinema
Film Features 2006 Week
Snakes On A Plane was Hollywood's first time misreading social media

With a title like Snakes On A Plane, it was sure to be a hit. Or, at least, that’s what the loudest voices online at the time believed. The thriller—briefly retitled Pacific Air 121 before star Samuel L. Jackson made the producers revert it—had enough dumb-fun “Chuck Norris Facts” energy to elicit plenty of buzz from the nascent social web. Arriving in 2006, just as Facebook began enrolling non-college students and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey was “just setting up my twttr,” Snakes On A Plane became a cautionary tale about trusting the wellspring of irony online. The lesson: Just because anonymous posters say they want something doesn’t mean they’re willing to pay for it. The movie still has to be worth the price of a ticket.

Snakes On A Plane had tremendous buzz for a movie about a serpent infestation on a commercial flight. And, like every organic meme, it had humble beginnings. During a 2005 junket interview for the forgotten Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy two-hander The Man, Collider asked Jackson about his upcoming film Pacific Air 121. “Snakes On A Plane, man,” Jackson corrected the outlet. “We’re totally changing that back. That’s the only reason I took the job: I read the title.” 

Back in the pre-algorithmic days when Snakes On A Plane was preparing for takeoff, Google didn’t own YouTube, MySpace was the top of the social media heap, and hearing a rando’s opinion on the internet meant that you actively sought out a blog or read it on a message board, chat room, or comment section. Three days after Collider published its story, screenwriter Josh Friedman, who later contributed to the Avatar sequels and wrote Fantastic Four: The First Steps, took to his Blogspot (née Blogger) to herald: “Snakes on a Mother fucking plane.” 

Friedman revealed he agreed to do “a little work” on the project due to its “Everlasting Gobstopper” of a movie title. He also seemingly gave the film its catchphrase. “As the great Sam Jackson would say: There are motherfucking snakes on the motherfucking plane,” he wrote. “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.” 

This narrative took hold, and so did the phrase. The film didn’t even have a website, but the meme-makers of the mid-aughts were already rising to the occasion. The weirdos over at Something Awful, the birthplace of all pre-4chan memes, began making threads of parody posters. The Homestar Runner-obsessed jokers at Newgrounds went viral with an audio trailer. And what would the 2006 internet be without fake audition videos on eBaum’s World? The fans would have their say, and what they were saying was “Samuel L. Jackson better say ‘motherfuckin’ in this movie.”

The groundswell of interest caught New Line Cinema off guard, but, sensing a hit on their hands, the studio acted. In March 2006, New Line scheduled five days of reshoots, juicing up the film’s violence with nipple- and penis-biting reptiles, and, more importantly, getting Jackson to utter those magical “motherfuckin'” words. The reshoots “saved the movie,” according to Jackson. Originally, director David R. Ellis had been aiming for a PG-13 rating, which, Jackson continued, “restricted my cursing and gore […] It’s kind of like them changing the name of the movie. It’s stupid.” 

As many have noted, these reshoots effectively began the era of fan-influenced film production. Don’t like Sonic The Hedgehog’s teeth or that Justice League is too short? Consider hectoring the studio until they make the movie you want. But while some of those bets have paid off, Snakes On A Plane did not. 

From the trades to the blogs to the C-suite, Snakes On A Plane had the visibility to be one of the year’s biggest movies. In reality, it simply revealed that the internet isn’t a consensus builder. To be fair, by today’s standards, Snakes wasn’t even that big of a bomb. It opened at number one with $15 million, before maxing out at $62 million. Add $24 million in DVD sales, and Snakes On Plane nearly tripled its $33 million budget. However, because of the financial realities of filmmaking (and Hollywood accounting), New Line founder Robert K. Shaye called it “a dud,” one that would become the poster child for films failing to live up to online hype. 

Yet, it wouldn’t be the last time studios would mistake the internet’s jokes for earnest interest. In 2022, encouraged by the strength of “Morbin’ Time” memes, Sony re-released Jared Leto’s vampire superhero movie Morbius back into theaters two months after its initial bow. The re-release earned roughly $280,000.

Back in 2006, studios were less familiar with the realities of the internet. The mechanisms for capturing online interest were only getting started. In the 20-year-old reports about Snakes On A Plane, few, if any, mention a recently launched user-generated video platform called YouTube. During Snakes-a-mania, early YouTubers posted parodies, video remixes, “All Your Base Belongs To Us” variants, and other cat-based ephemera. In the pre-“David After Dentist” world, before “viral” was really a thing, these videos, now collecting digital dust, offer a glimpse of things to come. Today, the film industry finds itself at the start of another internet gold rush. A24’s Backrooms and the low-budget blockbuster Obsession were made by YouTubers for an audience that grew up on the platform. The major difference is that these filmmakers understand the world they’re making their movies for. 

Snakes On A Plane was actively courting memers and, through reshoots, trying to engage with the trend in real-time. Hollywood moves too slow for that, which is why we’re getting a Skibidi Toilet movie several years after that meme’s peak. But the marketing moves quickly: The type of grassroots content that sprang up around Snakes On A Plane has never been easier to manufacture. Studios now attempt to use clipping—a technique borrowed from manosphere influencers to astroturf online spaces and create the illusion of organic interest—to give a Snakes On A Plane-like virality to movies like Insidious: Out Of The Further. Snakes On A Plane is the rare thing that could never happen again yet seemingly happens all the time. If the movie came out today, there would be numerous stitches on TikTok calling Snakes On A Plane a psyop. But it wasn’t. It was just a digital example of something Hollywood has always done: Chased trends. The difference here was that, for the people making and laughing at the memes, the memes were enough. For everyone else, Snakes On A Plane was a non-starter.

 
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