Saturday Night Live season 43: Will Gal Gadot be first host?
For premieres, SNL does have a history of picking people who had a breakout summer in some form. Take, for example, Chris Pratt or Margot Robbie. They have also brought on alumni like Tina Fey or notable funny people like Seth MacFarlane, but they do often like to start off the season with someone who helped to define the months the show was off the air in terms of entertainment.
With this in mind, there’s one name that stands out above all others: Gal Gadot. Going into the opening weekend for Wonder Woman, expectations were for it to be a fairly-large hit that generated some buzz. However, what’s happened instead is that the movie’s blown the doors off of Hollywood. It topped $100 million in its opening weekend, is poised to topple The Mummy in its second weekend, and has tremendous reviews and word-of-mouth backing it up. There’s a wonderful sort of irony in this movie being the one to right the ship for DC Films, given that for so many years there was hesitation as to whether or not a Wonder Woman movie would make any money.
Now, it has proven some of those ridiculous doubters wrong, and the future is beyond bright for Gadot as a top-tier movie star. She’ll likely have another Wonder Woman movie in addition to her Justice League commitments, and doing SNL is just another great way to show her comedic chops. How she fares on the show depends heavily on the material given to her, but there are a lot of funny directions that the show could go. (Wonder Woman certainly could be a relevant and funny figure through the lens of today’s political climate, though we don’t think DC would love the character getting overly political.)
The biggest challenge for the SNL premiere, no matter who hosts it, is that the show will need to rebuild much of its chemistry. Remember for a moment here that you’ve lost already Bobby Moynihan, Vanessa Bayer, and Sasheer Zamata, and it’s absolutely possible that there could be some more people who decide to depart over the summer. The future status of Alec Baldwin as Donald Trump is also unclear. The first week or two of a season can be a little bumpy, though we did enjoy the premiere with Robbie this past season more than most.
Do you think that Gal Gadot would be the perfect host for the season 43 premiere? Share in the comments below! (Photo: NBC.)