Jason Reitman has been working on his SNL film for a while now and it will now be known simply as Saturday Night. More on the film’s release below.
Saturday Night Live, or SNL, is probably one of the most iconic comedy shows of all time. The live sketch comedy variety show – try saying that five times fast – has been running since 1975 and is showing no signs of slowing down, so a feature film on it was an inevitability rather than a possibility.
In 2023, we learned that Jason Reitman was going to be directing a film based on SNL and writing it with Ghostbusters co-writer Gil Kenan. In March this year, we learned that JK Simmons would appear in the film, but Sony Pictures has now updated the film’s name and given it a release date in the US.
The film previously went by the name of SNL 1975, but the title has been changed to Saturday Night, as reported by Variety. The film will follow the 90 minutes before the very first broadcast in October 1975.
Fittingly, Sony will release the film in cinemas on 11th October, the same date as the first broadcast almost 50 years ago. There’s no confirmed release date for the film’s UK release, but we’re hoping it’ll be around the same time. Then again, we’ve been wrong before.
The film’s large ensemble cast includes Gabriel LaBelle (as Lorne Michaels), Dylan O’Brien (Dan Aykroyd), Cory Michael Smith (Chevy Chase), Rachel Sennott (Rosie Shuster), Lamorne Morris (Garrett Morris), Nicholas Braun (Jim Henson), Finn Wolfhard (NBC page), Jon Batiste (Billy Preston), Ella Hunt (Gilda Radner), Cooper Hoffman (Dick Ebersol), Andrew Barth Feldman (Neil Levy), Naomi McPherson (Janis Ian), Willem Dafoe (David Tebet), J.K. Simmons (Milton Berle) and Kaia Gerber (Jacqueline Carlin) and more.
Saturday Night’s official synopsis promises that the film is “based on the true story of what happened behind the scenes in the 90 minutes leading up to the first broadcast of ‘Saturday Night Live.’ Full of humor, chaos and the magic of a revolution that almost wasn’t, we count down the minutes in real time to the famous words: ‘Live from New York, it’s Saturday night!’”
Count us in. We’ll let you know when Saturday Night has a UK release date.
