Drop Dead Fred

The project was first offered to Tim Burton to direct and Robin Williams to play Fred, and both turned it down. It went instead to director Ate de Jong and to Rik Mayall, the British comic of The Young Ones, with Phoebe Cates as Elizabeth, a timid Minneapolis court reporter whose husband, purse, car and job all leave her in quick succession. Back in her childhood bedroom at her mother's house, she peels the tape off an old jack-in-the-box and out comes Drop Dead Fred, the imaginary friend her mother sealed away, ready to sink a houseboat and wreck a restaurant on her behalf. Filming ran through August and September 1990, much of it at Prince's Paisley Park Studios outside Minneapolis. "I didn't meet him," de Jong said of Prince, "but there were people who say they did," and were given a tour. The striped suit was costume designer Carol Wood's idea, not the script's; its colors were meant to suggest prison bars.

New Line Cinema, which released the film on May 24, 1991, kept a veto over the grosser material and limited Fred's "Mega Bitch" to two uses, with "Mega Beast" substituted elsewhere. Made for just under $6.8 million, it opened to about $3.6 million and finished its domestic run under $14 million. Gene Siskel gave it zero stars and called it "easily one of the worst films I've ever seen," and its Metacritic score sits at 25 out of 100.

The film did not stay dead. It was sold as a kids' comedy, but test screenings had already shown it landed with adults who had once had an imaginary friend or simply liked watching someone behave badly toward adults, and on home video it became a genuine cult object. Writing in the Telegraph in 2021, Alexander Larman called it "a sophisticated and ahead-of-its-time black comic exploration of anxiety and depression." De Jong has said psychotherapists in California use it in their practice. A remake with Russell Brand as Fred was developed around the turn of the 2010s and quietly dropped after his Arthur remake flopped, and when John Krasinski's imaginary-friend film IF came out in 2024, the comparisons were immediate, though Krasinski said he liked Drop Dead Fred and denied any direct connection.