Baby's Day Out
A nine-month-old crawls across Chicago following the pictures in his storybook while the three kidnappers chasing him absorb every injury a John Hughes script can invent. John Hughes wrote it, America ignored it, and it ran for months in Kolkata.
John Hughes wrote Baby's Day Out as Home Alone with the age dialed down to nine months. Bink Cotwell, heir to a Chicago mansion, is snatched by three crooks posing as newspaper baby photographers and held for a $5 million ransom. Joe Mantegna, Joe Pantoliano and Brian Haley play the kidnappers, one of whom reads Bink his favorite book to put him to sleep, dozes off himself, and wakes to find the baby gone out the window after a pigeon. The rest of the film is Bink recreating his storybook page by page, a blue bus, a department store, a zoo where a gorilla takes a paternal interest, a construction site, while the three men absorb the kind of punishment Hughes had previously reserved for the Wet Bandits. Twins Adam and Jacob Worton played Bink, Verne Troyer was his stunt double, and Patrick Read Johnson directed.
Shooting ran from August to December 1993 in Chicago and Los Angeles, and Industrial Light & Magic built one of the earliest fully computer-generated cityscapes for the shots looking down from a construction crane. Twentieth Century Fox released it on July 1, 1994, and it flopped: about $4 million opening weekend and under $17 million in the US and Canada against a $48 million budget. Critics mostly panned it. Roger Ebert gave it one and a half stars and wrote that its gags "might have worked in a Baby Herman cartoon," though he admitted the audience cooed at the twins; his partner Gene Siskel liked it, calling it an "absolute perfect child's-eye view" of a kid's fantasies. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an A. A finished tie-in game for Super Nintendo, Genesis and Game Boy was cancelled just before its October 1994 release; the ad for it is still on the VHS.
Then it found its audience. On a visit to Kolkata in 1999, Ebert was told by the owner of a large theater that Baby's Day Out was the most successful film he had ever run, playing to full houses for more than 17 weeks, and it was remade in Telugu, Hindi and Malayalam within five years. In America it lived on the rental shelf, where the sight of a baby crawling unharmed through a construction site while three grown men are flattened turned out to be exactly what a six-year-old wanted from cinema.
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