It scraped together 16 million on a 12.5 million budget, but it just couldn’t defend itself against Aliens, Top Gun, and The Fly that summer. So it settled into video store retirement where it spent the next couple decades generating dust and rental fees in roughly equal measure.
The story of how it got there, though…
Harold Ramis wrote the original script as a vehicle for Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. That version died whith Belushi in ’82, so the project sat dormant for two years until producer Brian Grazer pulled it off the shelf and started shopping around for a director.
John Carpenter came aboard, with Aykroyd and Candy attached to star. Then Aykroyd insisted the script had to end with a car chase so Carpenter walked. Aykroyd followed him out shortly after. Grazer, who’d just had a hit pairing Candy with Tom Hanks in Splash, tried to reunite them here. Hanks dropped out. So Candy called Eugene Levy, and finally Mark L. Lester (Commando) came on to direct.
Meanwhile, Ramis was so unhappy with the finished product that he had his executive producer credit removed, though his screenplay credit stuck.
It’s a portrait of how mid-80s studio filmmaking actually worked when the engine was running dirty. Usually a project with this much turnover gets killed in development. Somebody eats the development costs, doesn’t get a Christmas bonus, and moves on.
But in 1986, home video had become a legitimate revenue stream for studios, and Columbia could take a film with a famous face on the box and see five years of steady rental income stretching out past whatever the opening weekend delivered. You didn’t need a bonafide hit anymore, you could settle for a slick product that could sit on a shelf and turn a passive buck. This is something the smaller video distribution companies like Vidmark and New World had already figured out.
Armed and Dangerous delivered this, and Columbia’s sunk cost fallacy got rewarded. The video store safety net was in place, and the entire industry learned that it could afford to take a few more chances given this new shelf economy.
Of course, forty years on, none of that baggage follows you into the film. Nobody’s wondering what the Carpenter version would have looked like. Ok, I do, but you can watch it clean, and what you get is Candy and Levy, two comedic masters doing their thing, bouncing off each other with the ease of two people who’d been in the trenches since SCTV in 1976. -Pop
Armed and Dangerous arrived on Home Video this week in 1987, after an August 15th, 1986 theatrical release.