The Naked Gun reboot wouldn’t be the same without the snowman sequence, one of the silliest and funniest parts of the movie. However, the scene was “polarizing” for some during the making of the film, and co-writer and director Akiva Schaffer had to fight to keep it.
In pure Lonely Island comedic style, the scene follows Frank Drebin Jr. (Liam Neeson) and Beth (Pamela Anderson) as they travel to an isolated winter cabin where they use a book of spells to bring a snowman to life. The whole sequence is shown in an ”80s-style love montage, until it turns into a horror movie inspired by 1998’s Jack Frost.
“It was polarizing in script-reads,” Schaffer said during an interview on the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “People I really respect, like Andy Samberg, when he read it for me, he was like, ‘Snowman’s the best. Do not let them cut it,’ knowing it would be cuttable. It makes sense once you see the movie, but at one point I did have to threaten to quit.”
Even if the moment made it to the final cut, Schaffer took the opposition into consideration and made sure the sequence could be removed from the film without disrupting the story. Apparently, in some versions of the script, the snowman was meant to reappear at the end of the film, but the scene wasn’t filmed.
Samberg and the director were ultimately right, of course – from the first test screenings, said Schaffer, “it was the number one scene in the movie.”
“The people that really fought me on it after ate a lot of crow without me asking. I tried to let them off the hook easy, and go, ‘That’s fine,’ but they were like, ‘No, dude, we were wrong’,” he recalled.
The snowman scene might be a direct response to the 1988 original love montage with Leslie Nielsen and Priscilla Presley, but Schaffer and co-writers Dan Gregor and Doug Mand wanted to make sure that the reboot offered something unique for viewers.
“No offense to other reboots and redos and legacy sequels out there, but a lot of them are so stuck on re-doing the stuff that the original did,” Schaffer argued. “You watch them and are delighted, but it’s like empty calories, and when it’s done, you barely remember that you saw it because, my theory at least, is they’re not really a new movie. They’re fan fiction of the old movie.”
The Naked Gun is now out in theaters. For more, check out the best upcoming movies coming your way in 2025 and beyond.
