Coming to America (1988) on Netflix
Akeem Joffer, prince of Zamunda, is handed an arranged bride on his 21st birthday. He asks his father for 40 days abroad and reaches Queens with Semmi, posing as a poor student.
- Netflix3.6/5
- IMDb7.1/10242,475 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes71%
Trailer
Plot summary
Prince Akeem Joffer is tired of a life in which servants attend to his every need. On his 21st birthday his father, King Jaffe, and his mother, Queen Aoleon, bring forward Imani Izzi, the woman picked out to be his bride. Akeem would rather marry someone with a mind of her own, a person who would want him and not his rank, so he asks his father for 40 days in the outside world. With his friend and aide Semmi, he travels to Queens, New York, rents a rundown apartment in Jackson Heights and passes himself off as a poor foreign student. At a neighborhood rally he meets Lisa McDowell, and she seems to be what he came looking for. He and Semmi then take jobs at the restaurant run by her father, Cleo.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Coming to America (1988)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Humorist Art Buchwald sued Paramount in 1990, claiming Coming to America was lifted from his 1982 treatment about an African potentate visiting America, a project the studio had once optioned with John Landis and Eddie Murphy attached before dropping it in 1985; Buchwald won the breach-of-contract case and was awarded damages.
- Eddie Murphy said he considered directing Coming to America himself but hired John Landis instead, even though Landis still treated him like a novice five years after Trading Places; Murphy noted Landis's career was "hanging by a thread" after the Twilight Zone trial when he gave him the job.
- According to Arsenio Hall, Paramount Pictures insisted on having a white actor in the cast and supplied a list of three white performers; Murphy and Hall chose Louie Anderson because they knew him and liked him.
- The jingle for the commercial for the fictional product Soul Glo was composed by Nile Rodgers, who has suggested it is his "proudest moment", with vocals provided by Christopher Max.
- Eddie Murphy was paid an $8 million salary plus 15 percent of film rentals for the movie, while director John Landis received $600,000 plus 10 percent of gross receipts.
- Coming to America earned $128 million domestically and $288.75 million worldwide, making it Paramount's top earner of 1988 and the third-highest-grossing film at the US box office that year.
- Cuba Gooding Jr. made his film debut in a tiny role as a boy getting a haircut in the barbershop scene, right as Akeem and Semmi first arrive in Queens.
- Paramount canceled subsequent press screenings of the film after an early New York City screening drew negative reactions from critics.
