Disney’s first ever R-rated movie
Ever since being founded in 1923, the Walt Disney Company has maintained a status as one of pop culture’s leading lights, adhering to its core principles of making content across all mediums that families could enjoy together.
However, after 60 years of playing it safe, a downturn in fortunes led to the Mouse House taking a detour that had never seriously been on the table before. These days, subsidiaries including Pixar, Lucasfilm, Marvel Studios, and 20th Century Studios have broadened the company’s cinematic horizons, but an R-rated movie emerging from Disney was nigh-on unthinkable until it happened.
While the outfit has plenty of sub-studios that make adult-orientated film and television titles, the initial sea change only happened once Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg took the reins in 1984. The very same year, Touchstone Pictures was founded and dipped its toes into the water with the hit Tom Hanks comedy Splash as its very first release.
Several more all-ages titles followed before it was decreed that the time had come for the boat to be well and truly rocked, with Down and Out in Beverly Hills becoming the first-ever R-rated feature to come with the backing and blessing of the all-powerful Disney machine.
Loosely based on the French play Boudu sauvé des eaux – which had itself been adapted for the screen in 1932 by Jean Renoir – Nick Nolte’s homeless man breaks into somebody’s property to try and drown himself in their swimming pool. When Richard Dreyfuss’ owner interrupts, he ends up being welcomed into a dysfunctional family that offers him a brand new lease of life.
Hardly blood, guts, and gore, but Down and Out in Beverly Hills, featuring profanity, sex and nudity, drug and alcohol use, and smoking, was enough to see it handed an R-rating. Disney was never going to release it under its main production arm, effectively insulating itself from any blowback were it to prove too controversial, take a critical pasting, or flop at the box office.
In the end, none of the above proved to be true, with the film recouping its production budget almost four times over from cinemas in the United States, winning strong notices, and even spawning a short-lived television series, all while reigniting Dreyfuss’ stagnant career after personal issues and poor choices of projects had seen his star wane considerably.
From then out, Touchstone became a haven for hugely successful and eclectic R-rated titles, including Good Morning, Vietnam, Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, Ransom, The Village, and Con Air, to name just a few. Having spent six decades without showing an interest in tackling stories with harder edges, Down and Out in Beverly Hills ended up opening the floodgates that would be decades of commercial success.
