Brewster's Millions (1985) on Netflix
Montgomery Brewster, a minor-league pitcher, learns his late great-uncle left him $300 million. To inherit it, he must get rid of $30 million in 30 days and keep the reason secret.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.5/1047,753 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes39%
Trailer
Plot summary
Montgomery Brewster, a pitcher who has spent nearly 15 years moving between the minors and the majors, is with the Hackensack Bulls when a bar fight after a game lands him and catcher Spike Nolan in jail. A stranger named J.B. Donaldo pays their bail and takes them to a Manhattan law office, where executor Edward Roundfield explains that Brewster's great-uncle, Rupert Horn, has died and left him the estate. Brewster can take $1 million outright, or he can try for the whole $300 million by burning through $30 million within 30 days, owning nothing at the end, giving none of it away and keeping the arrangement secret. He takes the challenge, and the firm assigns paralegal Angela Drake to follow his spending. He moves into a Plaza Hotel suite and hires staff at high salaries.
Cast
- Jerome Dempseyas Norris Baxter
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Brewster's Millions (1985)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Walter Hill said Richard Pryor "didn't believe that he was funny unless he took drugs, and he believed that if he took drugs he would die", adding that Pryor had money problems and so had to work and take jobs.
- The baseball park said to be in Hackensack, New Jersey was really the re-used set from the short-lived TV series Bay City Blues, standing inside the 153 acre LADWP Valley Generating Station in Sun Valley, California; the UK's Princess Anne visited during filming, and the set was demolished in 1989.
- Walter Hill later called the movie "an aberration in the career line", it being his only flat-out comedy, and said that whatever its deficiencies the wistful quality was there, and that the picture did well and made money.
- Walter Hill had never made a comedy before, but he had made the successful 48 Hrs., which featured comic scenes and a comic lead in Eddie Murphy; the script came from the writers of Murphy's Trading Places.
- Peter Bogdanovich was the original director of the adaptation and had planned to include it among the six independent pictures he scheduled for 1983; his version was reported as being most similar to Allan Dwan's 1945 adaptation.
