Demolition Man is a 1993 American science fiction action film directed by Marco Brambilla in his directorial debut. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock and Nigel Hawthorne. Stallone plays John Spartan, a risk-taking police officer with a reputation for causing destruction while carrying out his work. After a failed attempt to rescue hostages from evil crime lord Simon Phoenix (Snipes), they are both sentenced to be cryogenically frozen in 1996. In 2032, Phoenix escapes and the authorities awaken Spartan to help capture him. The story makes allusions to many other works, including Aldous Huxley's 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World and H. G. Wells's The Sleeper Awakes.
The film was released in the United States on October 8, 1993, to mixed reviews from critics. It earned $159 million worldwide, and was considered a successful film for Stallone.
Plot In 1996 Los Angeles, psychopathic criminal Simon Phoenix kidnaps a busload of passengers. Police officer John Spartan, nicknamed "The Demolition Man" for the collateral damage he often causes in apprehending suspects, mounts an unauthorized assault to capture Phoenix. When a thermal scan of the area reveals no trace of the hostages, he raids the building and confronts Phoenix, who sets off explosives to destroy everything. The hostages' corpses are found in the rubble and Phoenix claims that Spartan knew about them but attacked anyway. Both men are sentenced to lengthy prison terms in the California Cryo-Penitentiary, in which convicts are cryogenically frozen and undergo subliminal rehabilitation techniques.
In 2032, the city of San Angeles – a megalopolis formed from the merger of Los Angeles, San Diego, and Santa Barbara after a massive earthquake – is a seemingly peaceful utopia, designed and run by Dr. Raymond Cocteau. Phoenix is thawed for a parole hearing but escapes using skills he did not have before. Discovering that he can hack into the city's computer networks, Phoenix taunts and easily overpowers several police officers who attempt to stop him, to the disbelief of officers watching remotely from their headquarters.
Lieutenant Lenina Huxley, an idealistic officer fascinated by 20th-century culture, learns about Spartan's career from veteran officer Zachary Lamb. He suggests that Spartan is their best chance to stop Phoenix, as someone with the experience and mindset to anticipate his actions. Huxley persuades her superior to parole and reinstate Spartan. Spartan finds life in San Angeles to be sterile and oppressive, since all types of behavior deemed immoral or unhealthy have been declared illegal.
Anticipating that Phoenix will attempt to secure firearms, Spartan has Huxley lead him to a museum, where he finds Phoenix looting a weapons exhibit. Phoenix escapes, unexpectedly encounters Cocteau, aims a gun at him, but freezes, unable to kill him. Cocteau orders Phoenix to kill Edgar Friendly, the leader of the Scraps, a resistance society that lives underground. Spartan arrives to find Cocteau unharmed and ponders why Phoenix would spare his life.
In gratitude for being "saved", Cocteau invites Spartan and Huxley to a formal dinner at Taco Bell. Spartan notices the Scraps' approach during the dinner and interrupts their attempt to steal food but begins to sympathize with them. Acting on a hunch, Spartan has Huxley investigate Phoenix's rehabilitation program and finds that he has been given technological and combat skills to make him even more dangerous than he was in 1996.
During a private meeting, Cocteau expresses his displeasure with Phoenix over the lack of progress in handling Friendly, threatening to return him to the cryo-prison if he fails his mission. Phoenix persuades Cocteau to release additional cryo-prisoners, then leads them underground to assassinate Friendly, only to find Spartan and Huxley already there. They thwart the attempt on Friendly's life, and Phoenix tauntingly reveals to Spartan that he framed him for the deaths of the 1996 hostages; they were dead long before the building exploded. Afterward, as Phoenix escapes to meet Cocteau, Spartan borrows weapons from the Scraps and pursues him.
Pleased with Phoenix's improved terror campaign, Cocteau boasts of his intention to tighten his control over San Angeles. Phoenix, still unable to kill Cocteau, has a gang member kill him instead, then kills his own gang, and begins the process of thawing out the cryo-prison's most dangerous convicts. Spartan incapacitates Huxley for her safety, then takes out Phoenix's gang. He battles Phoenix and kills him by freezing him solid and the uncontrolled freezing triggers an explosion that destroys the prison.
The police fear that the loss of the prison and Cocteau's control will end society as they know it. Spartan urges them and the Scraps to work together, combining both the best aspects of order with personal freedom. Huxley and Spartan kiss, then depart together.
Cast
Production Development
The original script was written by Peter Lenkov, who retained a story by credit. Lenkov came to Los Angeles straight out of college with no connections, and wrote seven different scripts, desperately hoping to break into Hollywood. Selling the spec script of Demolition Man to Warner Bros. was his first big break. Lenkov had been inspired by Lethal Weapon and wanted to do something about cops. He was also influenced by stories of celebrities being cryogenically frozen and listening to Sting's song "Demolition Man" on repeat due to a broken cassette player in his car. His initial pitch was rejected by an executive who did not understand his "frozen cop" idea. The finished script, where a super cop has to battle the world's deadliest criminal, in a future where there is almost no crime, generated more interest.
Writer Daniel Waters (known for Heathers) said his version of the screenplay was essentially a rewrite; he changed the script so extensively that when the script went to arbitration he received first screenplay writing credit. In the early drafts the script was a regular action movie, with no attempt at comedy. Waters pitched it as an action movie version of Woody Allen's Sleeper. Waters had an idea about a small part of Universal City, a shopping and entertainment area called CityWalk, and wondered what it might be like if one day all of Los Angeles might be like that, and the idea grew from there. Waters says his intention was to have fun, that he was not trying to be political or deeply examine political correctness. He cited the conclusion of the film, where society will need to find a new balance and compromise, as representing his own position in the political middle ground. Burger King was originally written as the winner of the franchise wars but they were not interested in being part of the film. McDonald's also declined to be involved. Taco Bell welcomed the opportunity. The "three seashells" concept originated when Waters was trying to come up with ideas for a futuristic restroom and called writer Larry Karaszewski for suggestions and he happened to be using the restroom when he answered the call. He looked around his bathroom and said he had a bag of seashells on the toilet as decorations, so Waters decide to use that. A joke was cut from the script, where after using the three seashells and washing his hands, Spartan was confronted by the same ineffective hand dryer from his own time. Waters wrote some of the script on index cards while waiting in line for Johnny Carson tickets. He said it was some of the fastest work he'd ever written and that he had only worked on it for two and a half weeks.
The film began with Spartan being taken out of cryogenic freeze in the future of 2032, until Fred Dekker did uncredited rewrites on the script, adding the Los Angeles 1996 prologue, to showcase Spartan and Simon Phoenix in their natural environment and make the differences of the future more striking. Dekker explained "If you don't show Kansas, Oz isn't all that special." Jonathan Lemkin also did uncredited rewrites on the film. Steven de Souza read the script but was unavailable to commit to rewrites. De Souza recommended setting the film in the more distant future to make the culture clash more plausible. Producers rejected his suggestion because they wanted to keep the subplot of Spartan finding his daughter Kate but ultimately that subplot was cut from the film. The script had been in development for six years before filming finally began.
Director Marco Brambilla had a background in shooting big-budget TV commercials and this was his first feature film. Brambilla was working to make Richie Rich, starring Macaulay Culkin, but they could not get the budget they needed. Instead David Fincher recommended Brambilla to producer Joel Silver as director for Demolition Man. Steven Seagal had originally been attached as leading actor and Jean-Claude Van Damme had been offered the part of the villain Phoenix. Brambilla met Sylvester Stallone a few days after getting attached to the project and started re-writing the script with Daniel Waters. The film went into production approximately eight months after that. Silver was able to get highly experienced crew for the film, including editor Stuart Baird and cinematographer Alex Thomson. Brambilla brought costumer Bob Ringwood to the project because of his work on Dune (1984) and wanted Thomson because of his work on Alien 3 (1992).
Casting Stallone passed on the project at first, but came back around to it. He liked the idea of two equal opponents in Spartan and Phoenix and decided to take a chance on doing something he had not done before. Stallone wanted Jackie Chan for the role of Phoenix. Chan turned it down, not wanting to play a villain. Wesley Snipes turned down the role several times, so Joel Silver and Marco Brambilla went to the set of the film Rising Sun to try and convince him in person. Brambilla explained what he thought the film could be and his passion for the script they were writing, and the next day they received a call and Snipes agreed to do the film. Brambilla said of Snipes, "He works without rehearsing too much, and he improvises a lot. The two of them, that combination of energies and the way they interact, really did the movie a lot of favors. They completely respected each other and were really professional, and they did get along. There was no ego or any competition between the actors." Lori Petty was originally cast as Lenina Huxley but was fired after two days of filming due to what Silver called "creative differences". Petty attributed it to personality differences, as she and Stallone did not get along, and said "Sly and I were like oil and water." Silver was looking for a replacement and Lorenzo di Bonaventura recommended Sandra Bullock; impressed by her audition tape, Silver hired her. Denis Leary said he was hired for his comedy rants, which he wrote himself and had to undergo a long approval process by the studio before they were included in the script. Nigel Hawthorne took the role of Dr. Raymond Cocteau to raise his profile, as he was primarily known as a television and stage actor. Having missed out on the lead role in Shadowlands to Anthony Hopkins, he wanted to make sure he was chosen for the film adaptation of The Madness of King George.
Filming
General Motors provided the production team with 18 concept vehicles, including the Ultralite. More than 20 fiberglass replicas of the Ultralite were produced to portray civilian and SAPD patrol vehicles in the film. After filming had completed, the remaining Ultralites were returned to Michigan as part of GM's concept vehicle fleet.