Pat Sajak’s one major Hollywood appearance barely budged the box office

Wheel of Fortune host Pat Sajak recently announced that the 2023–2024 season of the hit game show will be his last. To double our sadness, it appears co-host Vanna White’s contract expires at the end of next year, leading many to wonder if the duo will be leaving the show in tandem.

This has led to renewed interest in Sajak and White’s careers, including appearances in little-known projects that were overshadowed by their massive success across more than 40 years on Wheel.

As it turns out, White had tons of side projects, including terrible made-for-TV romances, early 1990s action duds, cameos on various television shows, and even some wrestler interviews for the WWE (WWF back in the day).

Yet, Sajak seemed content to stay in his lane as seller of vowels and corrector of rudimentary spelling mistakes. However, he did appear briefly in one film:

That’s right: Sajak appeared in 1982’s Airplane II: The Sequel, a parody of the disaster films that dominated cinemas in the 1970s (Airport and its sequels were the primary targets of the Airplane series’ juvenile sendups). Although the original Airplane was a hit at the box office and with critics, the sequel didn’t fare as well.

Critics lamented the absence of the comedy-writing team behind the original Airplane — brothers Jerry and David Zucker, and Jim Abrahams, who all went on to make the Naked Gun series. Audiences didn’t find much to love, either: The film earned only $27.2 million in the U.S. and Canada, compared to the original’s haul of $83 million in those territories.

And what of Sajak’s performance? It’s functional but brief, as he appears during a montage of various news outlets providing the day’s top stories. Credited only as “Buffalo Anchorman,” Sajak delivers a pretty mild joke about a lunar shuttle heading toward the sun instead of the moon. But hey, at least he looks at home speaking to an audience:

Currently, Ryan Seacrest is set to take over for Sajak, even though Vanna White is literally right there, standing by all the letters.