I watched John Candy: I Like Me for the first time on an airplane, and I was prepared to full out bawl at the content. While it did get emotional in moments, Colin Hanks’ documentary mostly gives you a warm picture of a man that lit up the room every time he walked in, a man who had struggles of course, but always wanted to take care of others. There’s a darker version of John Candy, the man that often gets compared to funnymen Chris Farley and John Belushi, who also died too young. But Hanks stands by not going there.
The documentary director put out I Like Me, a title nodding back to Candy’s iconic Planes, Trains and Automobiles movie, in late 2025. Months later, it’s still making an impact on his fans. Hanks recently admitted there was a more “salacious” version of the Prime Video movie he could have made, but chose not to, mentioning to THR:
It’s my job as a filmmaker to not create drama but to show where that drama actually existed and present it in a way that is engaging. Everybody experiences trauma in some shape or form. It doesn’t have to be big-T trauma. But those personality traits — that gregarious, everybody-come-together energy — was what made John special. They were also learned coping mechanisms.
John Candy died in 1994, a dozen years after fellow comedian and former SNL star John Belushi died of a drug overdose. Chris Farley, often compared to Candy as another over-the-top comic personality, passed away in 1997 also from a drug overdose. Candy died in his sleep while making the movie Wagons East! He famously wasn’t taking good care of himself at the time, but it wasn’t drugs that took him from his friends and family.
People make parallels between the three men because they were all taken from us too young. They were all funny, and that comedy masked some pain. John Candy’s story was different, though, and he’d made such an impression on Colin Hanks at a young age, the director wanted his movie to allow that version of Candy to be the lasting one.
It’s not just Hanks he made an impression on either. There’s the great advice he gave Mike Myers about getting into comedy. There’s the time he got real with Conan O’Brien about doing comedy. There’s the lovely way he looked out for Macaulay Culkin when his own dad wasn’t on the set of Uncle Buck. Everyone who knew John has a story about him like this.
The darkest I feel the documentary gets has to do with career choices Candy made, both about keeping up weight for Hollywood roles, but also saying “yes” to too many people that maybe took for granted that willingness to say “yes.” Hanks said he saw Candy as a person as an “everyman.” He wanted the documentary to be relatable. The end result is a mesmerizing watch that certainly encapsulates the impression the actor made on others.
If you haven’t given it a watch yet, it’s worth checking out with your Amazon Prime subscription. Spaceballs 2 is also coming without him, but his castmates have done a lot to reassure us Josh Gad is pulling from the right place.