Hollywood, for at least ten years, has been very profitable in the age of nostalgia. Jurassic World: Renaissance It is the highest grossing film of this summer and the biggest success remake of Lilo and Stitch He is at the top of the 2025 ranking, but a priori it seems that this era is coming to an end. The end of Stranger Things This could be a closure as well as a poetic one, and would leave us wondering what comes next. What new era will succeed the era of nostalgia? Although Tom Gormican is not a famous filmmaker, he could have found the key: the Meme Era.
Nostalgia and memes work the same way. They depend on shared imaginations and the instant recognition of those who experience them. If they do not arouse complicity, they wither away. The difference is that memes don’t have as much affinity for strong emotions or a childish-style paradise lost, as they tend to be quicker and more clownish. Nicolas Cage is a meme for the pleasure his films provided with no respect for prestigious thermometers. Also for his eccentricity as a public figure. For its simple image. The unbearable weight of enormous talentdirected by Gormican, was dedicated to this phenomenon.
In 2022, Cage agreed to star in a film entirely inspired by his memetic condition. The cult that surrounded him exploded into a meta-referential comedy, aimed at the entire digital community that so appreciated his work. Ironically or not, it doesn’t matter. Whether we like the question more or less – and whether it is more or less useful to the future mutations of commercial cinema which continue to compensate for its lack of imagination – the reasoning that Gormican followed for The unbearable weight of enormous talent is analogous to that which cements Anaconda.
Without the existence of the Internet, it would have been impossible to imagine a comedy in which Cage parodied himself. Likewise, without the existence of the Internet, no one would ever have thought of creating a remake of Anaconda28 years after the original film. Anaconda It’s a film famous, above all, for being very bad. No one had the courage to feel nostalgic for her.
All for the meme
Or almost no one. The protagonists of Anaconda of Gormican, they remember her with great affection. The 1997 film caught the group of friends consisting of Griff (Paul Rudd), Doug (Jack Black) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) as children and inspired them to want to go into acting. But so far, no one has succeeded. Griff is a failed actor and Doug is filming wedding videos. The plot of this new Anaconda It starts when they acquire the rights to the film Anaconda (the one from 97) and they decide to go to the Amazon to film a remake. The situation will become more complicated when they encounter a real giant snake, putting them in mortal danger.
Hollywood has accustomed us in recent years to many types of late exploitation of intellectual property. There is the sequel and the prequel. Also the “inherited sequel” or the “requelle”, where the notions of sequel merge, restart And remake. There is no official term for the type of aftereffect practiced by the new Anaconda (meta-sequel?), even if we have already encountered on other occasions the idea that the original film exist in the universe of the new iteration. It happened in the saga of The human centipedeFor example.
What’s interesting, however, is how, organically, Anaconda It fits into the logic of the meme. The fact that its protagonists are fans of the 90s film is no joke because, as is well known, there are generational classics that permeate culture thanks to the unintentional humor they generate. Confusion turns into knowing wink, or honest admiration for artistic sensibilities that challenge established molds. It is this attitude that led, for example, Tim Burton to make Ed Bois oh what The disaster artist honored one of the “worst films in history” (winning the Golden Shell, which the The room original). And this is a purely cinephile attitude, in which the degree of condescension can vary.
The affinity of Anaconda With these premises, it’s a little more complex if possible due to the type of source material it uses – and which forces its meta-sequel to articulate itself as a horror-adventure comedy – alongside the resonance it found in the more sarcastic areas of the meme. THE Anaconda directed by Lluis Llosa – cousin of the late novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the film’s many hilarious elements – was released at the precise moment when multiplex-oriented monster cinema was seeking to become more popular, thanks to digital effects.
He blockbuster monstrous, inaugurated by Spielberg in 75 with Shark and renewed by himself in 93 with Jurassic Parkwas on the verge of disappearing. They were ruined by films as expensive as they were massacred by critics. Anaconda, Congo (1995) — another adaptation from the same Michael Crichton who designed Jurassic Parknow with the gorillas involved -, and the succession in 1999 of Jaws (giant crocodile) and Deep blue sea (giant sharks). Everyone wanted to benefit from Spielberg’s success, without worrying about a minimum of cinematic dignity. It is no coincidence that The Asylum, the production company of Sharknado.
Anaconda It won the Razzie Awards (the anti-Oscars) and became a cult title thanks to its cheap CGI, its extremely stupid script and its misguided performances – between Ice Cube and a grotesque Jon Voight, for a Jennifer Lopez who didn’t know what to do.
It was a box office success but, adapting to the winds of the industry, only one sequel was released theatrically (Anacondas: The hunt for the blood orchid2004); the following ones went directly to video or television, on the Syfy channel. Anaconda In short, he completely succumbed to his Serie B heart and came to have a crossing with Jaws —Jaws vs. Anacondain 2015 – after Snakes and Crocodiles had a parallel trajectory between theaters and Syfy.
Between “Anaconda” and “King Kong”
SO Anacondawhere we see it, represents the transition of the monsters who led the blockbuster from the 70s and 90s to the mockery of cheap television and the Internet. Of Shark has Sharknado. From the luxurious spectacle of Hollywood to evenings with friends, washed down with alcohol and soft drugs, where we can enjoy films “so bad they are good”. With what is a fitting title to anchor this possible Meme Era and it is understood that Gormican continues like this The unbearable weight of enormous talent. But the links are even more complicated.
We have more or less assumed that with the succession of blockbusters dirty days of the late 90s, megalomaniacal monster cinema has expired. Years later, we have to be content – beyond the jokes of Syfy and The Asylum – with anemic productions like Megalodon or limited by franchise constraints such as the Monsterverse of Godzilla and King Kong. But before all this, there was one last effort to maintain gigantism in the insane world. remake of king kong by Peter Jackson (2005). Where, as in this new AnacondaJack Black was a daredevil director who encountered gigantic monsters in the jungle.
king kong returned to king kong from the 1930s – inaugural title in the classic monster tradition – in the same way as this Anaconda returns to Anaconda of the 90s, making it the inaugural title of the postmodern monster tradition. This genealogy determines what to expect from Tom Gormican’s film, and it’s not just that it doesn’t take itself seriously: Anaconda the 90s didn’t do it too much either, but the action is more subservient to the straight comedy. A comedy that, in the same way, pays sentimental homage to the “bad cinema” style The disaster artistis also intended to be a satire of contemporary Hollywood.
The conviction is seen in both leagues. The group of loser friends is well assembled and it’s clear that Gormican knows this demolition cinephilia first-hand, while throwing witty jabs at the industry – not so much because of his obsession with exploiting intellectual properties, but because of the need for the latest horror films to have “themes” – and knows how to handle the pop quote. The use of the song Anaconda by Nicki Minaj is a measure of the film’s ingenuity, which isn’t too striking but deserves to be considered, at least, as a little more drinkable than its ’97 forebear.
Despite this, the intelligent attitude of Anaconda is not enough to overcome the serious defects already present in The unbearable weight of enormous talent. Meta-humor tries so hard to circulate through nudges that when it doesn’t hit, it becomes grotesque. Their greatest asset in avoiding this is that Rudd and Black are excellent actors, but that only goes so far: Gormican’s direction is so incompetent, the chaotic editing so illustrates clumsy and rushed filmmaking, that the connections with the original film reach undesirable extremes.
The displaced character of Daniela Melchior, or the painful visual packaging of the film, confirm that this Anaconda can only boast to the Anaconda original in knowing how to follow the changing moods of the Internet. Which, of course, is not much and conveys the worst expectations for the spread of this Meme Era.
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