{"id":362886,"date":"2025-12-23T01:52:09","date_gmt":"2025-12-23T01:52:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/362886\/"},"modified":"2025-12-23T01:52:09","modified_gmt":"2025-12-23T01:52:09","slug":"the-christmas-movie-classic-that-marked-chevy-chases-biggest-90s-mistake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/362886\/","title":{"rendered":"The Christmas Movie Classic That Marked Chevy Chase\u2019s Biggest \u201890s Mistake"},"content":{"rendered":"

That film was ultimately directed by John Carpenter who also had nothing nice to say about the project. The film was a disaster by the time it came out in 1992, and shortly afterward Chase would pivot again to the project he would ultimately do instead of The Santa Clause: The Chevy Chase Show.<\/p>\n

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Chase\u2019s contentious history with late night actually went back further than his movie career, with the comedian being eyed as a potential successor for Johnny Carson as host of The Tonight Show as early as 1975. After the first episode of Saturday Night, Dave Tebet reportedly said<\/a> to other executives, \u201cChase is the only white gentile comedian around today. Think what that means when Johnny leaves.\u201d<\/p>\n

And in a profile cover story in New York magazine, Chase publicly toyed with the idea before dismissing it<\/a>: \u201cI\u2019d never be tied down for five years interviewing TV personalities.\u201d Perhaps that line is why Chase was never invited to guest host The Tonight Show like NBC executives dreamed, or why it would be another half-decade before Chase was invited again to be a guest on Carson\u2019s show.<\/p>\n

Circa 1993, however, things were different. Chase\u2019s pivot to \u201cdramatic\u201d work had gone up in smoke. Meanwhile studios were still offering him roles like playing\u2026 the Santa Claus. So in the wake of Carson finally retiring for realsies from The Tonight Show, and his throne remaining in question as David Letterman defected to CBS, Chase took a $3 million offer from Fox Broadcasting to become their own late night gamble\u2014after Dolly Parton passed.<\/p>\n

In addition to signing Chase for $3 million, Fox spent another $1 million renovating<\/a> Los Angeles\u2019 Aquarius Theater into the renamed \u201cChevy Chase Theater.\u201d And on Sept. 7, 1993, The Chevy Chase Show debuted on Fox, a week after Letterman\u2019s new CBS premier and a little over a year after Jay Leno\u2019s ascent on CBS. The Fox contender was canceled six weeks later.<\/p>\n

In a statement to The New York Times about his show\u2019s ignoble end, Chase said he found talk shows to be a \u201cvery constraining format\u201d and that \u201cmy hat is off to those guys who do this kind of work. It takes a tremendous effort and long hours of commitment.\u201d But in a telling further pivot, he said he was already looking forward to the other movie he shot in early \u201993: Cops & Robbersons, a late jumper on the buddy cop movie bandwagon that paired Chase, playing a street-wise crook, with Jack Palance as a \u201ctoo-old-for-this-shit\u201d cop. It was a flop.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"That film was ultimately directed by John Carpenter who also had nothing nice to say about the project.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":362887,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":{"0":"post-362886","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-movies"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=362886"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/362886\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/362887"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=362886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=362886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=362886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}