MacGruber may one day rise again, but it won’t be anytime soon.
In 2010, Will Forte brought his “Saturday Night Live” character, a spoof of the iconic action TV series “MacGyver,” to the big screen with the “MacGruber” film. Directed by The Lonely Island trio, it boasted a solid cast with Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Val Kilmer, Maya Rudolph and Powers Boothe.
Sadly it was also a notorious bomb – the film pulled in mixed reviews from critics and audiences. Even with a tiny $10 million budget to minimise the damage, the film only earned $9.3 million at the box-office and essentially exited cinemas after three weeks.
Cut to ten years later, and Peacock, desperate for original content and finding the film’s home video sales over the years good enough, gave the green light for a TV series follow-up. Forte, Wiig, Phillippe and Rudolph returned, whilst they were joined this time out by Sam Elliott, Laurence Fishburne and Billy Zane.
That eight-episode series premiered in late 2021 and landed a much more positive review reception. However, the fate of the show doesn’t look great according to Forte himself in a recent interview with Slashfilm. Out talking up his role in the Sundance film “Aliens Abducted My Parents and Now I Feel Kinda Left Out,” the comedian delivered the bad news but would return if he could:
“I would say chances are, I want to say slim. I mean, I would say that I think they would’ve told us by now, but at the same time, you cannot ever count out MacGruber. Who would’ve ever thought we’d have gotten a chance to do a season after the movie tanked?
There are just so many people on the crew behind the scenes that are such a part of it, the names that people don’t know but are instrumental in the lifeblood of this thing. It’s a big family that we would love to all be together again.
I would never count it out. We just need to wait for the right time. And there’s a very good chance that it’ll never happen again. Or we find some way to make it happen again, which would just be a huge blessing. We didn’t think we’d get to do this last season, so anything else will just be gravy on gravy.”
Officially Peacock never really cancelled the series, but “MacGruber” has essentially been lumped with NBC Universal’s other early attempts at original series like “The Lost Symbol” and “Rutherford Falls” that didn’t really take off.
