Development and writing

Lawrence Gordon came up with the original idea for the film.^[4] The premise had the Governor of Louisiana's daughter kidnapped by a criminal, who strapped dynamite to her head and threatened to blow her up in 48 hours if the ransom was not met. The meanest cop goes to the worst prison in the state and gets out the most vicious criminal for his knowledge of the kidnapper who was his cellmate. Walter Hill says Gordon may have had the idea as far back as 1971 and a few writers worked on the project. In 1975 Gordon was making Hard Times with writer-director Walter Hill and editor Roger Spottiswoode. Spottiswoode wanted to direct and Hill suggested he break in by writing a script. He did a draft of 48 Hours supervised by Hill for Columbia Pictures, who had financed 48 Hours. Later Tracy Keenan Wynn worked on the script.^[5]

The film moved from Columbia to Paramount, which wanted to do a draft for Clint Eastwood. They hired Hill to rewrite the script with Eastwood as the criminal. He did so "but when I turned it in I said that I didn't think it would work," Hill said, adding "that the best idea would be to make Richard Pryor the criminal and have someone like Eastwood play the cop. Back in '78 or '79, no one seemed to think this was such a good idea."^[5] Eastwood ended up playing a criminal in Escape from Alcatraz instead. As a result, 48 Hrs. went into limbo for two years. However, Gordon and his co-producer Joel Silver did not forget the project. Gordon called Hill and asked him if he would make the film with Nick Nolte as Cates.^[4] "Paramount felt that the combination of Nick Nolte and a good black actor would be commercial," said Hill. "What happened is very simple: Richard Pryor is now an enormous movie star, and that's changed everybody's mind about black lead players."

From the start, Hill envisioned a more improvisational film than he'd ever before created. "The story is a traditional urban thriller: two terrible guys are out there and have to be brought down," he said. "But even though I enjoy working in genres, the point is always to explode them or give them a transfusion. So I made a very conscious decision to go with the elements of personality of the two players, rather than be overly genuflective to the narrative. Thrusting a white policeman and a black convict together carries so much gravity that we didn't have to beat the white-black thing to death. If it works, it's because of the actors' personalities."^[5] Hill's first choice after Richard Pryor was Gregory Hines. When he was not available, Hill's then-girlfriend Hildy Gottlieb recommended her client, Eddie Murphy, then best known for his work on Saturday Night Live.^[6] The character of Reggie Hammond was originally named Willie Biggs, but Eddie Murphy felt that was too stereotypical of a black man's name and changed it to Reggie Hammond.

Steven E. de Souza worked on the script for a few weeks after Eddie Murphy was cast. Critic Michael Sragow says "The producers recommended de Souza to Hill because they thought he'd be good at adding a light touch to the action. Hill didn't find de Souza fast enough or his style of comic writing appropriate to the movie; he thought the writer contributed gags instead of personality touches (very few of which were used), and he just didn't develop the rapport with de Souza that he'd later have with Gross."^[5] Hill brought on Larry Gross to work on the script three weeks before shooting.^[7] He told Gross "I've been working this fella and while I like em I know it's not gonna work out...." and called the film "a shaggy dog story. Defiant Ones plus chuckles."^[8]

Sragow says, "Hill has been known throughout his career for defining character through action rather than psychological banter, but he knew that this movie would be more of a character piece than a plot picture, and he wanted a writer who'd challenge his own habits and assumptions. Throughout filming, Hill joked that he waved the flag called 'myth and archetype'—trying to play off the folkloric expectations an audience might have for a big blonde hero like Nick Nolte-while Larry Gross waved a flag called 'social and psychological realism.' The writers' relationship became so symbiotic that Gross often found Hill coming down on the side of S&PR and Gross defending the prerogatives of M&A."^[5]

Gross says his main contributions were: the idea that Reggie Hammond wanted badly to have sex after three years in prison; Nick Nolte having a relationship with his girlfriend that mirrored the frustration Eddie was having; improving "the nuances of the relationships between Nick and his girl, his boss and the killers. The killers were sharpened up and made more interesting... Whenever Walter could invent a monologue for one of the women (all bit parts), he would." Gross thought Hill had received "a bum rap on the woman question." "One of the things I think makes 48 HRS. really more interesting than the average kind of movie like this," says its co-writer, "is that, although women play relatively small roles in the narrative, they kind of haunt everyone's imagination. The film really is sort of a screwball comedy about men and women trying to get together and not getting together, even though it is a very conventional gangster piece." "People had this perception of Walter being melancholy," Gross said. "And now that he's made this film no one thinks he's melancholy anymore."^[9]

Filming

Filming started on May 17, 1982 and ended on August 18, 1982.^[10] The film was shot on-location in San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Murphy started a few weeks after principal photography began because he was finishing up a season of Saturday Night Live.^[4][11] The shoot went well but Hill ran into problems with studio executives. Michael Eisner, then head of Paramount, was worried that the film was not funny enough. Hill and his co-screenwriter, Larry Gross wrote more material tailored to Nolte's and Murphy's personalities. By Hill's account, they rewrote Murphy's character right to the very last day of shooting. Executives also found the footage of the gunfight in the hotel to be too violent and were worried that it would kill the film's humor. They told Hill that he would never work for Paramount again as a result.^[4] Actor Chris Mulkey, said it was widely known on set that Paramount executives hated what they had seen of Murphy's performance in dailies and wanted to fire him, but Nolte and Hill fought to keep him. Mulkey remembered Murphy as a diligent performer who was open to suggestions and stuck to the script.^[12]

In 2008, co-writer Larry Gross's contemporaneous diary of his days on set was published on the MovieCityNews website.^[7]

Box office

48 Hrs. opened in the United States on Wednesday, December 8, 1982, with its first weekend the same as The Toy and Airplane II: The Sequel and finished behind them in third place for the weekend with a gross of $4,369,868 from 850 screens,^[15] and had a gross of $5,273,192 from its first 5 days.^[16] The film grossed $78,868,508 overall at the U.S. and Canada box office,^[17] surpassing their combined box-office, to become the seventh highest-grossing film of 1982.^[3]

Critical response

48 Hrs. received critical acclaim and is considered by many as one of the best films of 1982.^{[18][19][20][21]} On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 92% approval rating, based on 50 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Marking an auspicious feature film debut for Eddie Murphy, 48 Hrs. is a briskly paced action comedy that succeeds largely due to the outstanding chemistry between its two leads".^[22] On Metacritic, the film has a score of 71 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".^[23] In 2007, the staff at IGN named the movie the third-greatest buddy cop film.^[24]

Awards and nominations