‘Anaconda’ Director Tom Gormican Explains How That Very Last-Minute Franchise Cameo Transpired

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[Thisstorycontainsspoilersfor[ThisstorycontainsspoilersforAnaconda (2025).]

Anaconda filmmaker Tom Gormican entered the entertainment industry at a time when more traditional forms of comedy still had sway at the box office. His feature directorial debut — the “bromantic” comedy, That Awkward Moment, starring Zac Efron, Miles Teller and Michael B. Jordan — made nearly six times its $8 million budget in 2014. Little did anyone know at the time, but that respectable profit margin would soon become the envy of most comedies that were released in subsequent years. Gormican then turned his attention to network television, an experience that went so well that he and his creative partner, Kevin Etten, immediately retreated to features, opting to write something that simply made them happy.

That something was The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talentstarring Nicolas Cage as a fictional Nick Cage and Pedro Pascal as his billionaire superfan. The meta action-comedy didn’t light up early 2022’s unpredictable box office, but it was very well received among audiences and industry folks. More importantly, Gormican had found his voice as a filmmaker. That win led to him and Etten co-writing Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F in 2022, and then they were hired to “reboot” 1997’s Anaconda in 2023.

“Someone asked [co-writer/producer Kevin Etten and I] after The Unbearable Weight [[of Massive Talent]‘Do you guys have a take on Anaconda? Are you thinking about this property?” And we were like, ‘Of course, we’re not thinking about Anaconda,’” Gormican recalls to The Hollywood Reporter. “So we said no initially, but then we thought about it for about a week and came back with the initial pitch. We just said, ‘If you let us do The Big Chill becomes Anacondathen we’d be interested.’ And we thought they would be like, ‘Get the fuck out of here.'”

It turns out that Sony reacted well to their pitch that would combine the meta comedic fun of The Unbearable Weight with horror-thriller elements in between. Paul Rudd, Jack Black, Steve Zahn and Thandiwe Newton play childhood friends whose lives haven’t gone as planned, at least until Rudd’s Griff twists all their arms to finally pursue their adolescent dream of remaking 1997’s Anaconda in the Amazon rainforest. One can surmise that Gormican and Etten’s story was partially inspired by the crushing disappointment that led them to write The Unbearable Weight. Admittedly, Gormican would’ve preferred to make a completely original comedy that doesn’t involve any IP, but unlike in 2014, comedy is now in a place where it needs to be bundled with either a known brand and/or action/VFX spectacle.

“Kevin Etten and I didn’t really want to play in someone else’s sandbox or world. To me, that felt wrong. But at the same time, we make off-the-wall comedies that mix genres, and it’s very, very difficult to get something comedic made now,” Gormican says. “So that was part of the calculation. We were like, ‘How do you do that without comic IP?’ So that led us down the road of making[[Anaconda] funnier.”

Getting into spoilers, Rudd’s struggling actor character convinces his three friends that he’s somehow secured the rights to reboot Anacondahowever, his obvious lie is exposed when Sony’s authorized Anaconda legacy sequel cruises right past their own boat set on the Amazon River. That leads to third-act and mid-credit cameos from two of the legacy actors whose characters survived Luis Llosa’s 1997 original: Ice Cube and Jennifer Lopez.

Pulling off the latter appearance had ongoing scheduling challenges, but when test audiences reinforced that a Lopez appearance was warranted, Sony, as they’re known to do, moved mountains to help Gormican swing last-minute additional photography involving Lopez. (Like Cube, she plays herself, and approaches Black’s character, Doug, to take over directing duties for the legacy sequel that was torn to shreds by an anaconda in the third act.)

“I was finally able to shoot her cameo a month ago on Nov. 17. It was the very last thing we did,” Gormican says. “I was finishing up my final mix when I went to shoot it, and I dropped it into this [mid-credit] sequence that I was having built to accommodate it. I never thought it was going to ultimately materialize, but it did.”

Below, during a recent conversation with THRGormican also discusses whether Anaconda (1997) actors Jon Voight and Owen Wilson were ever close to cameoing, as well as how the funniest scene in the 2025 film emerged during post-production.

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It sounds like Sony initially wanted a prototypical reboot of Anaconda until you guys pitched your wild take. Clearly, it won them over in the end, but did the concept of Sony being a character give them some early pause?

(Laughs.) I think they had [justified] pause about this, but we heard from the producers after the fact that they’d heard 50 or 60 takes of Anaconda as a straight reboot. Someone then asked [co-writer/producer Kevin Etten and I] after The Unbearable Weight [[of Massive Talent], “Do you guys have a take on Anaconda? Are you thinking about this property?” And we were like, “Of course, we’re not thinking about Anaconda. I don’t know what we would do with it. ” So we said no initially, but then we thought about it for about a week and came back with the initial pitch.

We just said, “If you let us do The Big Chill becomes Anacondathen we’d be interested.” And we thought they would be like, “Get the fuck out of here.” But as [Sony Pictures president] Sanford Panitch said after the pitch: “I actually really like that idea. I think it’s really cool and fun.” We then talked about how to keep it out of the Hollywood zeitgeist. As you know, people in this town are so freaked out about anything that’s meta or inside baseball. It’s a relic of a couple decades ago where social media didn’t give everybody super familiarity with the way movies work and the behind the scenes and all the things that we know about now.

I appreciate your honesty about the franchise. I’m so used to hearing filmmakers say that they grew up with a lunchbox of whatever franchise they’ve expanded. But it doesn’t sound like you were a devoted fan of Anaconda.

I wasn’t.

Who is?

Yes, I know. It’s fun and funny and campy, so I do have a soft spot for that [1997] movie that came out my senior year in high school. I remember it fondly, but I don’t have some crazy reverence for it. It still has its own cult following, and Kevin Etten and I didn’t really want to play in someone else’s sandbox or world. To me, that felt wrong. But at the same time, we make off-the-wall comedies that mix genres, and it’s very, very difficult to get something comedic made now. So that was part of the calculation. We were like, “How do you do that without comic IP?” So that led us down the road of taking [another] genre and making it funnier.

It used to be that you could sell comedy in and of itself, but now it has to be packaged with something else.

Yeah, straight comedy has been almost impossible to sell the last seven or eight years.

Did you watch any of the straight-to-SyFy sequels just for the sake of curiosity?

Yeah, we’ve seen them all. We used to have references in the film to Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid [aka[akaAnaconda 2], but everyone was like, “What is that?” So we were like, “Alright, let’s just reference the original.”

Between Anaconda (2025) and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talentyou’ve carved out quite a niche for yourself in meta fiction. Was there much of a grand design behind it?

We’re generally drawn to these types of ideas where we’re blending reality and fiction in a referential way. We’re drawn to those things because they feel like interesting narratives, but the grand design was this. We did The Unbearable Weightwhich we thought was a very funny way into Nicolas Cage’s life. As I pitched to him, it felt like Dada performance art where he gets to create a version of himself to put out into the world. Then people said, “We like that. Can you do it on a larger scale?” That’s what they always say. And we were like, “I don’t think so. What do you mean?”

We then landed on taking the comedy and action from Unbearable Weight and adding another genre in horror-thriller for an even larger narrative challenge. We want to take giant swings for theatrical movies that seem hard and complicated, and this still seems complicated. We just finished the movie ten days ago, and you think, “I hope we threaded this correctly.” But this felt new to us, and it felt like people would go see it in the theater because it hasn’t been seen ten times in a row.

I asked director Paul King about the Paddington 2 flattery in Unbearable Weightand while he thought it was a very funny tribute, he, like a lot of Brits, had a tough time processing the compliment. Did you and your co-writer just project your own affinity for that movie onto the fictional Nick Cage?

Yes, that movie is astonishing, and Pedro [Pascal] and Nick thought it was very funny. At one point, a friend of Kevin Etten’s said, “It made me want to be a better man.” And we were like, “That’s hysterical.” So we took that line and gave it to Pedro Pascal’s character.

Paul Rudd and Jack Black make so much sense on paper and on screen that it’s hard to believe nobody has paired them together in a significant way until now. Were they also surprised that they hadn’t starred together in anything yet?[[Writer’s Note: Black and Rudd had uncredited roles as Paul McCartney and John Lennon, respectively, in Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Black also had a small part in Anchormanbut did not appear opposite Rudd.]

I think they were surprised. Their pairing just felt so natural. Even knowing that, I was like, “No, that’s not right. They must have starred together in something. It feels like they did.”

They actually thought they were playing the same role in Anaconda. Paul was initially attached to the film, and then the film wavered in terms of its viability and whether they were going to pull the trigger or not. Different people came in and out. Jack Black then read the script that night [he received it]and then he called me in the morning to say, “I’m doing the film.” So I told Paul, and he was like, “Oh, I’ll call him!” And as they were talking , they both thought they were playing the director character, Doug. Ten minutes into this phone call, Jack said something very funny to Paul, which he relayed to me. He said, “I have to play the director. I can’t play an actor. Look at me! I don’t look anything like an actor.”

If you’re going to pair them together, we thought it’d be funny to have them in reverse roles. Jack is such a talented and sympathetic presence. He’s such an innocent on screen that I thought it would be really nice to have him be the emotional center [and straight man] of the story. Paul — who’s usually the straight man and emotional center — got to shift over and be a bit of a loose cannon as the failed actor of the group. So we tried to make their pairing a little bit different.

Between Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire and the Jumanji movies, Paul and Jack have both made other franchise films for Sony. Did they volunteer any fun anecdotes for you to use?

(Laughs.) To their credit, no. I think they have more tact than to do that. They’ve generally had good experiences on their other franchises, which have been really successful for Sony. But I think it freaked out Tom Rothman and the Sony crew. At a certain point, we were like, “Is this okay? Should we talk about this?” And then I said, “Yeah, this is the conversation that’s going on. If you’re not incorporating the conversation, you seem insane.”

Was Paul reluctant to reveal his secret to being ageless?

(Laughs.) The red light therapy mask. I felt like I aged four billion years while making this movie in the jungle. I was constantly talking to Paul’s makeup artist and people, going, “You’ve got to send me this [mask]. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.'” But, yeah, he just defies nature. That’s just who he is. I don’t even think he does anything. It’s just a very Paul thing.

I saw a set video of Jack serenading the cast and crew with Paula Cole’s “I Don’t Want to Wait.” In general, it seems like you had a heck of a time wrangling these guys. Did you constantly check your watch on this movie?

I kept looking at the AD with absolute fucking panic in our eyes, going, “Oh my God, I don’t know how we’re going to get these guys to shoot.” We started using the God mic with speakers so we could be like, “We need you on your marks. We need to check our shots.” And they’d just keep talking. They’d stand there all day, from day one, talking, talking, talking. I’d then go back to the hotel pool after shooting, and [Paul, Jack and Steve Zahn] would be in the pool talking about nothing. And I was like, “This is going to end. No one stays friends on movie sets for this long.” But day 45, day 50, they were still in the pool talking about nothing after a full day of filming.

Jack eventually started grabbing the God mic from the AD and doing karaoke. He’d start singing, and then Paul would grab the guitar that’s on the boat we built. It was just madness and chaos. I was like, “I’m going back to single character movies after this.” They’re all such big, fun performers, and I would get wrapped up in it.

Thandiwe Newton has always struck me as a serious actor who doesn’t suffer fools gladly. How did she navigate the bedlam?

She handled the boys. She was so adept with these guys. She’s so tremendously talented that I would say, “There’s a fucking dead boar on Jack Black’s back, and it’s going to press what the audience and what the story will accept in terms of broadness. So every time I cut to you, I need you to ground this story.” And she was like, “OK!” And to her credit, she really understood that mission. When the snake is attacking and you need someone to sell the danger and keep the stakes up, she was the perfect vehicle to deliver that. Comedy deletes your stakes, and the stakes have to feel high for this whole thing to work. The relationship that she has with Paul in the movie also has very little real estate, and she sells you this idea that they should be together. She then gets her big head-butt moment at the end. It had a very dumb setup at the beginning of the movie, but she pulled it all off and really nailed her moments.

Were you able to shoot the script before your comedic geniuses inevitably strayed in subsequent takes?

That was the one thing Tom Rothman said to me when we started. He said, “Just make sure you get the script.” I had to balance it. I had to manage a tone across these scenes where a snake is going to kill someone in one scene, and then they’re talking about their movie and making you laugh in the next scene. I said to the guys, “The only way to manage this tone is to have you do the dramatic version first, and we’ll see if the situation carries us into some funny territory.” Across those scenes, I could at least modulate performance. Then we’d often lean on the composer, David Fleming, to basically bring us from one tone to the next, and drop you in the scene gracefully. That ended up being the most effective version.

Did Jack compose his opening scene? Or did David provide him a cue to mimic ahead of time?

Well, Jack did that. That was off the cuff. He had a scripted version, but then he started adding the very Jack Black flourishes to it. David was like, “Oh God, it’s not in time, and it’s changing keys.” (Laughs.) David is just a wonderful composer and human, and he had his hands full in composing along with Jack.

Filming the “pee-shy” scene must’ve featured more of the madness you referenced moments ago.

That was actually done on a reshoot. We tucked it into the movie after we went back to do some additional photography. Jack was like, “I’m sorry, so he’s peeing on my leg? Which leg?” Then I was blocking it out, and I was like, “Paul, can I just get you to sit down [like a human chair]?” And the guys were like, “What is happening right now? How did we sign up for this?” So Jack was lying on the ground and Thandiwe [Newton] was holding his hand and Paul was making himself into a chair for Steve to sit on [so his character could pee]and I was just like, “This is not a job for adult humans. How could this happen?” (Laughs.) So you start to question yourself and your own sanity, but luckily, it came out okay in the end.

There’s a hilarious joke in reference to franchise movies going into production without third acts, and despite having a third act, the universe found a way to make you experience the very thing you’re mocking. First, you lost your finale location mid-shoot, and then an ultra-rare cyclone wiped out your new location. That said, did you end up liking the new version more?

It’s one of those things where I can’t imagine other endings to the film now. We were an on-location shoot because it wasn’t the biggest budget in the world. We were out in the jungle; we weren’t on stages. We built our boats out in the wild, and that takes a toll. So we had to swap out our ending [after losing the original location] and write an entirely new ending, one that connected to the film the characters made as children. I then had to prepare the new ending’s location until it was destroyed by a cyclone. Then we built it again, shot the new ending and reshot the kids’ movie so that it linked up to the new ending.

When your story beats connect, it ends up having this cascading effect, and you have to go back and adjust them all. It became this large process where, thankfully, we were able to pull it off. Credit to the production designer, Steven Jones-Evans. I was like, “Find every dilapidated boat we can find, and let’s paint them.” I think he created that entire abandoned boatyard set in eight days. We did the whole thing, and we just dragged in boats from different marinas. So the job he did there was spectacular.

Ice Cube’s cameo is right before the boatyard sequence. Did his scene have to be reconceived as well?

100 percent. Throughout the different iterations of the ending, he came in lots of different ways. I just said, “We’ve got an abandoned boatyard, so let’s have him collect flare guns. If he’s stuck there on a [ravaged] film set, he would’ve found them as a way to defend himself.” I shot it a little bit like a Western where he shows up in silhouette. We can’t see who he is, and he’s just shooting. And I thought that dropping the guns behind him in a trail would be a very fun, very Cube way to enter the story and save our characters.

There are a few references to Jon Voight in the film. Did you guys ever have the what-if conversation with regard to a cameo?

(Laughs.) Of course! We would’ve loved to have had a Jon Voight or an Owen Wilson cameo, but the fact of the matter was their characters died in the first movie. The only reason those other returning actors are there is because they’re in the [legacy] sequel of the actual Anaconda movie being made. Of all things, we were like, “Oh, that reality is a bridge too far,” so we couldn’t actually have them in there.

I suppose Jon Voight the actor could’ve appeared in some capacity, but it does make more sense to have the actors whose characters survived the 1997 film.

Yes, essentially, [Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube] were doing a sequel to their movie, and they were the two survivors.

There’s so many levels to this.

Yeah, it gets to be a brain buster, but ultimately, who cares? (Laughs.) The reality is we had to keep it consistent, I guess.

Was the mid-credit scene cameo with Jennifer Lopez a late addition?

That was also a product of reshoots. We tried to get it as part of principal photography, but we couldn’t coordinate schedules. We had always wanted a version of her to come in, and we talked about it and talked about it and talked about it. I was finally able to shoot her cameo a month ago on November 17. It was the very last thing we did. I was finishing up my final mix when I went to shoot it, and I dropped it into this [mid-credit] sequence that I was having built to accommodate it. I never thought it was going to ultimately materialize, but it did, and we put it together. So it happened very, very late in the game, but we did have the idea a long time ago.

I really admire how agile Sony is. Their hit romcom, Anyone But Youhas a similar story as yours. I also covered their new I Know What You Did Last Summer movie in July, and they had just shot a new ending two weeks before that press day.

Wow, a couple of weeks. Sony is a testing-reliant studio, which can be really helpful. And whether the feedback is helpful or not, you, as a filmmaker, get to sit there and go, “People are checking out of the movie here,” or, “People desire this thing.” And because they allow you to test so much, you’re all on the same page with what might be helpful. If you use testing correctly, you can get a real sense of what you need. And as soon as we knew that we needed that [cameo] and it came to pass, our Sony executive, Maia Eyre, who had been pushing this for a long time, was like, “I think this is going to work.” And in the end, she was right.

This movie is both a meta reboot and a send-up of reboots. Do you think the 25-year emphasis on IP is ever going to slow down? Or has the industry made its bed?

I hope it slows down. Original films like Sinners and Weapons were based on original ideas by really, really talented filmmakers, and people went back to see them again and again. Being a comedy, we had to use a piece of IP, but we tried to make a wholly original idea that feels super f un. So I hope we move away from giving people reboots and retreads because it boxes filmmakers in. I don’t blame them. If you want to make a movie nowadays, you have to play that game. But a lot of original ideas have been doing so well that I hope the industry shifts more in that direction so a new era of great filmmakers can emerge.

Finally, if the Anaconda characters’ childhood dream is to make an Anaconda reboot, have you now accomplished whatever your version of that was as a kid?

I think we have. Making this feels like the most child-like fantasy movie that Kevin and I could have ever conceived of. It’s got a monster, it’s got pyrotechniques and it’s got a bunch of old friends. It feels like a kids’ movie with a budget. It has silliness and positivity, but it also has some grounded real-world themes about how it’s never too late to achieve your aspirations. That puts it firmly in our world while still allowing you to have fun like you did as a kid.

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Anaconda is now playing in movie theaters.