SPOILER ALERT:
This story contains MAJOR SPOILERS for the new Anaconda movie.
Released on Christmas, the new Anaconda film rebooted the franchise with a meta-comedy twist. Directed by Tom Gormican, the film followed a group of lifelong friends (Jack Black, Paul Rudd, Thandiwe Newton, Steve Zahn) looking to make their own reboot of 1997’s Anaconda wiht a low-budget production in Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest. Thus, it was not set in the same continuity as the original film, though it still featured some familiar faces that surprised fans.
In the new film, it is revealed that Sony has commissioned a legitimate Anaconda reboot to be shot in the same location, and at the same time, as the unauthorized version being made by the four friends. This leads to a surprising cameo from Ice Cube, who appears to assist the group with taking on the gigantic snake that has been hunting the filmmakers. A mid-credit scene later reveals another shocking cameo from Jennifer Lopez, who memorably co-starred with Cube in the 1997 original.
While there were some lines of dialogue that referenced other actors from the classic film, only Cube and Lopez physically appeared in the reboot. This doesn’t mean that there wasn’t any consideration from director Tom Gormican to also include Jon Voight and Owen Wilson, both of whom also appeared in the classic Anaconda. However, as Gormican explained in a recent interview with THR, it only made sense to bring back the actors whose characters survived in the original.
“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,” Gormican said. “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.”
He continued, “[Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube] were doing a sequel to their movie, and they were the two survivors.”
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Gormican also explained that that the cameos that were included were not without their challenges. The plans for bringing in Ice Cube changed after the filmmakers lost their original shooting location, leading to rewrites. Ultimately, Gormican and Co. were able to figure out a proper way to bring him in.
“Throughout the different iterations of the ending, he came in 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,'” Gormican shared. “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.”
As for Lopez, her special appearance almost didn’t even happen at all. While there were hopes from the start to bring in Lopez, scheduling conflicts kept her cameo from happening when the film was initially shot. Thanks to last-minute reshoots, however, the opportunity to bring in the desired cameo finally came up.
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“We had always wanted a version of her to come in, and we talked about it and talked about it and talked about it,” he said. “I was finally able to shoot her cameo… 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.”
Anaconda is currently playing in movie theaters.
