The single worst movie adaptation of a Saturday Night Live sketch costs more to own on iTunes than Oppenheimer, the Best Picture winner at the 2024 Academy Awards. But, to be fair, It’s Pat was the bigger bomb.
Saturday Night Live fans who belong to Generation Z or below may be surprised to learn that, back when Hollywood still made numerous mid-to-good comedy films every year, the ultimate goal of every running sketch and recurring character was to get that fabled film deal. Cinema classics such as The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World showed SNL don Lorne Michaels that feature films were a lucrative expansion opportunity for the show. Then one critically despised commercial failure marked the beginning of the end of the SNL movie.
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The 1994 disasterpiece It’s Pat took Julia Sweeney’s gender-undefined and already overplayed character Pat to Hollywood, where critics and audiences alike immediately ran them out of town. Grossing a pathetic $60,822 on a $8 million budget and boasting a rare 0 percent rating on RottenTomatoes, It’s Pat is widely considered to be one of the worst comedy films of all time – and, now, you can digitally own all 78 minutes of suck for just $18.
In It’s Pat, the title character with one joke stumbles through the world of C-list entertainment, from shock-jock radio to a couple Ween concerts, while their obsessive neighbor stalks them in an attempt to determine Pat’s gender once and for all. As it turns out, the gender guessing game that was already getting old in three-minute servings of sketch comedy couldn’t survive the stretch into a feature film, and the annoying, one-note and utterly unlikable Pat proved to be a completely unpalatable leading man/lady/they.
It’s Pat was so bad that, when Michaels spoke to Tom Shales and James Andrew Miller for their book Live From New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests in 2014, he still remembered the series of mistakes that led to the movie’s creation, and he described It’s Pat as a dark stain on his legacy.
“Michael Eisner called and said he wanted to make a movie based on character Pat, and I said I didn’t think so,” Michaels claimed, “Then Julia (Sweeney) came to talk to me. I had the right to stop her … but I said, ‘Good luck,’ and I let her make the movie. And ever since, it’s been on my record.”
Sweeney similarly distanced herself from It’s Pat, telling Dana Carvey and David Spade that she could have made better creative decisions with the character during a 2023 appearance on the Fly on the Wall podcast. “If I did it again, I would make Pat more enigmatic and make it clear that it was about the other people,” Sweeney reflected. “Almost more Charlie Chaplin-esque, not talking much and just about everyone else’s reactions — the way (Chaplin) was enigmatic and let everyone else react to him doing physical things. That would have been the way that I think it could have succeeded.”
Though, Sweeney clarified, “No one’s asking me to do that.”
Why, then, is Apple selling a digital copy of It’s Pat at a higher price than Award-winning contemporary films? Does the band Ween still have a stranglehold on the post-release sales thirty years later? Is Disney still trying to recoup the budget for its now-defunct label Touchstone Pictures?
Whatever the case may be, the average iTunes user would have a better viewing experience if they saved that $18 to buy a gallon of bleach and some sandpaper to rub into their eyes.
