Film Stories
Celebrating the amazing box office run of Bette Midler
By Simon Brew
May 24, 2021
She had one of the most incredible box office runs of hits in the 1980s and early 1990s, and it’s not talked about enough: celebrating the movie hits of Bette Midler.
In the summer of 1988, the long-gone (sadly missed) Premiere magazine in the US ventured onto an upcoming Touchstone comedy set. Touchstone was the label set up by The Walt Disney Company earlier that decade to allow it to target an older audience without compromising the Disney name’s wholesome family values (or something). And under the eye of Disney’s then live-action movie boss Jeffrey Katzenberg, it became known for modestly costed, hugely profitable hits. Films such as Stakeout, Three Men And A Baby, Dead Poets Society, and Sister Act would go on to be among the higher-profile examples of its successes.
The usual names appear when conversations occur about the comedy box office champions of the 80s. Eddie Murphy, Steve Martin, Goldie Hawn, Dan Aykroyd, Bill Murray, and Steve Guttenberg (yep, really) are but a few examples. Yet none of them enjoyed anywhere near the consistent run of box office hits that Bette Midler headlined from the mid-to late-80s (creeping into the early 90s, too). And, unusually, all of them were for one studio. That 1988 Premiere article was about a movie called Big Business, that Midler co-starred in. And it was her latest in an extraordinary run of box office successes.
Where it began
Midler first struck box office gold for Touchstone and Katzenberg at the start of 1986. She co-starred with Nick Nolte and Richard Dreyfuss in Paul Mazursky’s Down And Out In Beverly Hills (adapted from a French stage play). This was, pub quiz fans, the second Disney-backed movie to earn an R-rating, and it proved hugely successful. Costing a relatively humble $14m to make, box office receipts shot past $60m in the US (a very sizeable amount by 80s box office standards), and reviews were positive, too.
Midler was second billed, so it wasn’t clear how much her sizeable profile as a singer brought audiences to the film. But even as the tills were ker-chinging for Down And Out, Midler was already polishing off a second comedy for Touchstone, one that would follow into cinemas just over six months later. And it would be another big hit.
This time, she was recruited to star alongside Danny DeVito, Judge Reinhold, and Helen Slater in Ruthless People. A film also notable for being the first ‘straight’ cinema comedy from spoof movie legends Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker, this one is a dark, funny tale of a couple who kidnap their ex-boss’s wife, only to discover he has no intention of paying the ransom.
It’s a four-hander, with Midler as the kidnapped wife who has no intention of playing nice. Here, you get a snapshot of how Midler can both steal a scene and be a generous part of a comedy ensemble. Her biggest hits have seen her playing off other performers in cases where everybody is on each other’s shoulders rather than their backs.
When it wrapped, Ruthless People again earned an R-rating, but this didn’t stop audiences from flocking to see the film. Touchstone had another Bette Midler-powered hit on its hands, with the box office total this time creeping past $70m – not bad for a film that cost under $9m.
The legendary screenwriter William Goldman once wrote that at the turn of the millennium, every studio wanted to make an Adam Sandler movie. They were cheap to make, and the box office returns were sizeable (heck, at that stage, some of the films were good, too). Here, Bette Midler was making better films and fuelling the Touchstone label over a decade earlier.
And the hits came coming.
After a third straight success – which I’m coming to shortly – Disney moved to secure Midler’s services for a longer term. Thus, four years after he’d inked a five-picture deal with Eddie Murphy at Paramount Pictures, Katzenberg secured a similar deal with Midler. This time, Katzenberg wanted at least three more Bette Midler movies for Disney, and – unusually – he signed her up for such a deal.
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It’s unusual because, at that stage, such deals were getting much rarer. The agreement Katzenberg had previously inked with Eddie Murphy was in itself something of a hark back to the system of old, where studios would tie down a performer to its movies. The Midler deal felt even rarer.
Wild rose
The irony for Midler in committing to more was that at the time she signed up for the first tranche of Disney pictures, she couldn’t get film work anywhere else. After she’d made 1979’s The Rose, which fizzled at the box office, it took years for her to land another film job. That job wouldn’t help matters, as it turned out to be a largely forgotten movie named Jinxed. Midler was a name in music (interestingly, in her early films, she barely played the music card in her performances), but she wasn’t opening films.
Katzenberg, meanwhile, was notorious for snapping up talent on relatively modest salaries. As such, the pictures he developed for Touchstone never went for stars but relatively well-known performers, but not ones guaranteed to open a film. Midler – in the movie world at least – fit that criterion, and he hired her for those first few comedies, a mutually beneficial arrangement. That said, she took some persuading to sign up for the first of the films – Down and Out In Beverly Hills. As much as she was happy to be offered a good role in a movie, the then 40-year-old Midler was a little perturbed at first to realize she’d be playing the mother of a 20-year-old in the film.
As she told the New York Times back at the time, though, “I thought ‘oh what the hell, who cares?’”, and signed on the dotted line. She didn’t look back.
Katzenberg signed her to those above new three-picture deal in 1987. In doing so, he declared that “he was investing in the Bette Midler business.” It would be a shrewd investment. Midler’s third Disney comedy in a row, Outrageous Fortune, had just opened at the US box office and was already another hit.
The film would go on to smash through $50m at the box office, incredibly rare for an 80s movie headlined by two women, with Shelley Long as her co-star. There was a reported slight battle over billing, though, with Disney at different times promising both stars the top spot. A compromise was hammered out, which meant that in some states in the US, Midler got top billing on the poster, and in others, it went to Long.
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Not only was Outrageous Fortune another success, but this one also finally seemed to persuade the broader Hollywood ecosystem that Midler was someone who had quietly emerged as a movie star in her own right. Directed by Arthur Hiller (Love Story), Midler also got some of the best notices of her film career for it. She’d snare a Golden Globe nomination for the movie, too.
With that Disney deal in place and another box office hit in rapid-fire succession to her name, the hunt was on for what was next. Could she pick a collection of films that would earn her an extension to this remarkable run?
Yes. Yes, she could. Next on the slate was a reunion with Jim Abrahams, this time as sole director for Big Business. Again, Midler chose a project headlined by two women, albeit one initially put together for Barbra Streisand and Goldie Hawn. When they didn’t sign up, though, Midler stepped in.
Her co-star this time was Lily Tomlin. In this case, not only did Midler and Tomlin get their names above the title, but they got them there twice. They played identical twins, allowing the marketing team to list Midler first and last above the title, with Tomlin second and third. The film itself tapped heavily – and deliberately – into farce, and it’s a straight crowdpleaser. Again, it was quite a successful one. This time, $40m was banked – before takings from the likes of video – although the critical response was just a little more muted.
But then, in its way, that was a testament to the box office pulling power of Midler. Could she headline a film earning less enthusiastic reviews and steer it to a hit? Again, yes. And whilst Big Business is a fun, fluffy film to revisit, the two leads lift it.
For her next project, though – once she’d lent her voice to Disney animation Oliver & Company – Midler sought something different and a deliberate shift away from comedy. And that’s where we come to arguably the film for which she remains the best known: Beaches, one of the 80s’ most commercially successful weepies. Based on the novel by Iris Rainer Dart and adapted for the screen by Mary Agnes Donoghue, again, Midler opted for a film headlined by two women. In this case, her co-star was Barbara Hershey. Meanwhile, Garry Marshall was hired to direct, and he’d deliver a one-two for Disney, moving straight on to Pretty Woman once he wrapped.
Developed under the title of Forever Friends, Beaches was always intended for Midler to take on the lead role of CC Bloom (and she’d be a producer on the film, too). Hillary’s role was trickier to cast, and when Hershey came in for her audition, she faced a problem: Midler wasn’t able to be there so they could do their lines together.
As a consequence, as Hershey would recall to the New York Post at the end of 2018, her agent reported she was the best of those who auditioned but that the head of the studio felt something was missing between her and Midler. “Did you tell him it was Bette?” she quickly retorted. She ultimately landed the role, and the shoot was light for a film building to a tragedy—credit in part to the late Garry Marshall, whose background, of course, lay in comedy.
Still, the final cut was tough, and those involved were genuinely worried about screening the movie to Disney bosses. To the point where Marshall himself just sat outside in his car while they watched it. But their fears were ill-founded. As producer Margaret South recalled, the tough guy Disney executive whose opinion they were counting on was in floods of tears at the end. They were good to go.
That executive wasn’t alone. Whilst the immediate critical response to the film was hardly earth-shattering, and there was barely a sniff of a notable award nomination (save for an Oscar nomination for Art Direction), audiences flooded to Beaches. Nearly $60m was banked for arguably the least commercial – on paper at least – of the run of films Midler was making for Disney. More than any other in that run, too, Beaches has endured. A stage adaptation came along in 2014, and an American television remake was broadcast in 2017. The original film has remained a strong catalog title for Disney.
Next steps
While Marshall went on to Pretty Woman, Midler took different steps in her film career. The Samuel Goldwyn Company produced her next project, although Touchstone would not release it. It was 1990’s Stella, based on the 1923 novel Stella Dallas by Olive Higgins Prouty. It was a notable change of tone for Midler – a more serious drama about a single mother fighting for the best for her daughter. It was also a lower-key project that didn’t find its audience. While grossing $20m in the US, it still opened second at the box office. Roger Ebert was one of the few critics who fought its corner, writing, “Go to sneer. Stay to weep”. Almost inevitably, the 1990s box office was hardly awash with tales of single mothers.
Midler stayed with Disney and reunited with Paul Mazursky for her next film, Scenes From A Mall. A real oddity, this is notable for being one of the few films Woody Allen has acted in without writing and/or directing. The film broke even, but already Midler was hard at work on the underrated 1991 musical drama For The Boys. That was a bumpy film (one with a fanbase, though), made for a different studio – 20th Century Fox, in this instance. Even though it fell a little short of expectations at the box office, Midler won a Golden Globe and picked up an Oscar nomination for taking on the role of Dixie Leonard, an actor and singer who entertained the troops during World War II.
The early 90s did deflate Midler’s box office bubble just a little, although not to the point where her incredible achievement and run of success should become so overlooked. What’s more, Midler had two more aces up her sleeve.
In 1993, she starred in one of her favorites, Hocus Pocus, again for Disney. Headlining a terrific ensemble, the film is said to shift a million DVDs a year every Halloween. Then there was The First Wives Club, a sleeper hit for Paramount that exploded in 1996, and she was seen top the box office again.
After that, Midler took on further screen roles but devoted more and more time to her music, including a well-received HBO special. She continues to tour, record, take on stage work, and was back on the big screen last year, voicing Grandmama Addams in the latest take on The Addams Family. But amongst those achievements, she’s also enjoyed a box office run of hits that few of her contemporaries – male or female – have ever matched.
