Snakes on a Plane

2005catchphraseclassic

Published September 27, 2026

Snakes on a Plane is the 2006 Samuel L. Jackson B-movie whose ridiculous title generated over a year of online fan hype before it ever hit theaters, with bloggers, YouTube parodists and forum posters treating the premise as a punchline. Screenwriter Josh Friedman's 2005 post proposing the phrase mean the same as "shit happens" turned the title into a catchphrase, and New Line ended up shaping the film itself around fan suggestions, including Jackson's now-quoted "motherfucking snakes" line.

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Overview

The meme has two layers: the campy title-as-catchphrase, used as a fatalistic shrug in place of "whaddya gonna do?" or "shit happens,"2 and the film's most-quoted line, "I want these motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane," which fans wrote before it was ever in the movie.3 Both grew out of the pre-release buzz that turned the film into an early case study in fan-driven marketing.5

Parody output ran the range: mashup videos, fake theme songs, alternate movie posters, and a Varitalk phone service that delivered semi-personalized Jackson voicemails to 1.5 million callers in its first week.4 Because critics were kept away from advance screenings and the studio had no official site for most of the buildup, almost everything the public saw before August 2006 was fan-made.1

Origin & Background

Platform
Blogspot (source) / Something Awful, YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
Josh Friedman
Date
2005

The screenplay started in 1992 when University of Pittsburgh administrator David Dalessandro read a magazine article about Indonesian brown tree snakes stowing away in WWII cargo planes and adapted the idea into a script originally titled Venom.1 After being turned down by more than 30 studios, New Line bought the rights and hired Final Destination 2 director David R. Ellis; Samuel L. Jackson signed on after seeing the title alone.5

The meme itself kicked off in August 2005, when New Line briefly renamed the film Pacific Air 121 before Jackson publicly demanded the original title back.6 The day after that news broke, screenwriter Josh Friedman posted a blog entry declaring that "snakes on a plane" should be used interchangeably with "shit happens" and treating the movie's very existence as cosmic slapstick; the post drew more than 250 comments.2

How It Spread

The Friedman post spread through blogs and forums fast enough that Urban Dictionary entries defining "snakes on a plane" as a fatalistic shrug appeared within a week; the phrase was picked as Urban Word of the Day when the film opened.9 On October 6, 2005, Something Awful Forums user Brosa Parks started a parody-poster thread that gathered more than 320 replies in its first month.5

The studio noticed. In March 2006, New Line ordered five additional days of shooting to bump the rating to R, adding the "motherfucking snakes off the motherfucking plane" line that had first turned up in a fan video.3 YouTube mashups followed: on June 29, 2006, user CroFabJoe uploaded a Snakes on a Plane cut set to "All Your Base Are Belong To Us" that later passed two million views.7 Post-release remixes stuck around too, including a 2009 clean-language dub by YouTube user agonybooth that hit 2.9 million views.8

Despite the noise, the film opened on August 18, 2006 to only $15.25 million and grossed $62 million total, making the movie an equally durable reference for the limits of online hype.5

How to Use This Meme

Typically deployed as a shrug in the face of bad luck outside your control. Someone rear-ends your car, your flight gets canceled, your cholesterol reading is 290: the correct response is a resigned "snakes on a plane, man."9 The phrase functions the way "c'est la vie" or "shit happens" does, but with the added absurdity of the movie premise still hanging in the air.

Frequently Asked Questions