Critical Reception and Legacy (Lethal Weapon) Lethal Weapon (1987)

Lethal Weapon opened on March 6, 1987, on 1,295 screens. It earned $6.8 million on its opening weekend, $65.2 million domestic, and $120.2 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $15 million. The reviews were mostly favorable; the cultural conversation that built around it produced three sequels, an 18-episode Fox television series (2016-2019), and a buddy-cop subgenre that the next thirty years of American action cinema would imitate.

The contemporary reviews

Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars, naming it "the most exciting movie of its kind since 48 Hrs."

"Lethal Weapon is one of the very few buddy-buddy cop films that creates a real emotional bond between its two stars. The film really seems to be about Riggs and Murtaugh and their relationship, and not just about the cases." — Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times (March 6, 1987)

Janet Maslin in The New York Times praised the casting and the structural sophistication.

"Lethal Weapon is a film that lets a man's grief register as a fact about him without making the grief the subject of the picture. Mel Gibson's performance is the central pleasure. The film tells you who he is in three scenes — the trailer, the high-rise jumper, the lawn fight — and the audience reads them as continuous." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (March 6, 1987)

Variety's contemporaneous review was admiring of the construction and skeptical of the violence:

"A volatile, well-paced action drama with a curious mixture of compassion and violence. Donner has done a good job in keeping the picture from going soft despite some moments that veer dangerously close to lethal sentimentality." — Variety, original review (March 1987)

Pauline Kael in The New Yorker was more reserved, treating the picture as a competent commercial entry rather than as a structural achievement:

"Donner has made a buddy picture in which the buddies actually like each other. That's something, but it isn't enough to keep me from feeling that the violence is overstated." — Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (March 1987) — collected in Hooked (1989), book, page 287

The minority report came from Richard Schickel in Time and Stanley Kauffmann in The New Republic, both of whom found the film's tonal shifts (the comedy-then-violence rhythm) jarring rather than unifying.

The grosses

The film opened second behind Platoon's ongoing run and held in the top five for ten weeks. By the time it finished its theatrical run in late June 1987, it had earned $65.2 million domestic — at the time the eighth-highest-grossing picture of the year. International receipts brought the worldwide total to $120.2 million on a $15 million budget, an 8x multiple that made it one of the most profitable Warner Bros. releases of the decade. (boxofficemojo)

The franchise

Lethal Weapon 2 opened on July 7, 1989 — twenty-eight months after the original — and grossed $147 million domestic. The sequel was directed by Donner from a Jeffrey Boam screenplay (Black declined to write it) and added Joe Pesci as Leo Getz; Patsy Kensit and Joss Ackland anchored the antagonists. Lethal Weapon 3 (1992) added Rene Russo as Lorna Cole and grossed $144 million; Lethal Weapon 4 (1998) added Jet Li as the antagonist and grossed $130 million. The franchise total was approximately $955 million worldwide on a combined budget of around $200 million.

Black has said in interviews that he was contractually obligated to be offered the sequel writing assignment but turned it down on the grounds that Lethal Weapon was complete at the moment Riggs steps through the Murtaugh door. The franchise's structural problem — that the original film resolves Riggs's arc cleanly and the sequels have to manufacture new stakes — is the structural argument the original film makes against its own sequels.

"The picture ends when Riggs walks into the Murtaugh house. Anything after that is a different picture. I told them I'd written my version. They needed to find theirs." — Shane Black, interview with Creative Screenwriting (2013)

The genre inheritance

Lethal Weapon is the foundational text of the modern buddy-cop subgenre — see 48 Hrs to Lethal Weapon Buddy-Cop Lineage. Almost every American buddy-cop picture of 1988-2010 is operating from its template: Tango & Cash (1989), Bad Boys (1995), Rush Hour (1998), The Other Guys (2010), 21 Jump Street (2012). The Christmas-LA setting — see Christmas LA Setting — became its own visual frame and was repeated by Die Hard (1988), Trapped in Paradise (1994), and Reindeer Games (2000).

The spec-script economy Lethal Weapon triggered — see Shane Black and the Spec-Script Boom — is the picture's largest non-aesthetic legacy. Hollywood's 1990s screenplay marketplace was reshaped by the 1985 sale.

The retrospective reassessment

The 2007-2017 stretch produced the major retrospective coverage. Vanity Fair's 30th-anniversary feature (2017), the Vulture and Empire oral histories (also 2017), and the Hollywood Reporter's Donner interview have collected most of the on-the-record production history. The retrospectives have positioned the film as one of the foundational American action pictures of the late 20th century.

"Lethal Weapon is the action film at the cusp of two eras. It is the last film of the New Hollywood — the script is structurally sophisticated, the leads are characters before they are tools, the violence has emotional content. It is the first film of the modern blockbuster — the franchise structure, the spec-script economy, the Christmas-action setting. It carries both eras inside it." — Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com retrospective (2017)

The 2010s critical consensus (Rotten Tomatoes aggregate around 84%, Metacritic around 67, Time Out and Sight & Sound lists naming the picture in the 1980s top fifty) places it as a canonical American action film. The Library of Congress has not yet selected the picture for the National Film Registry; Die Hard (selected 2017) was the comparable inductee from the same period.

The Mel Gibson asterisk

The Gibson persona's post-2006 industry status — see Mel Gibson's 1987 Star Persona — has complicated the film's contemporary reception. The 2017 retrospectives largely treated Lethal Weapon as a document of a star's pre-fall period rather than as a film whose star was still actively making pictures. The 2024 Warner Bros. 4K UHD release was issued without a Gibson interview, against the standard practice of including a current-day star reflection on a vintage release. The film's reception has been bisected by the actor's biography in a way that few other 1980s films have been.

The Lethal Weapon television series

Fox aired a Lethal Weapon television series from September 2016 to February 2019, with Damon Wayans as Murtaugh and Clayne Crawford (later Seann William Scott) as Riggs. The series ran for three seasons (55 episodes). The pilot's reception was favorable; ratings declined across the second and third seasons, and the show was canceled after a behind-the-scenes dispute that produced the Crawford-to-Scott recasting. The series is treated by most retrospectives as a procedural footnote rather than as a meaningful continuation of the franchise.