Two-Minute Warning (1976) on Netflix
A gunman takes a position in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum ahead of a football championship game. Captain Peter Holly and SWAT Sergeant Chris Button must find him amid the spectators.
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- IMDb6.2/104,946 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes30%
Trailer
Plot summary
A football championship between Baltimore and Los Angeles brings a crowd to the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, where stadium manager Sam McKeever oversees the event. An unknown gunman has taken a position inside the building, and a camera on the Goodyear Blimp picks him out. McKeever calls the police, and Captain Peter Holly arrives with a SWAT team under Sergeant Chris Button; the two work out how to reach the sniper before the game ends. In the stands, argumentative Steve and Janet, gambling addict Stu Sandman, and young married couple Mike and Peggy Ramsay take their seats, an elderly pickpocket and a young accomplice move through the aisles, and Al flirts with Lucy while her date watches the game.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Two-Minute Warning (1976)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- It has been claimed that John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands took part in the film in order to obtain funding for Cassavetes' own 1977 film, Opening Night.
- The full stadium shots of the Los Angeles Coliseum are not staged crowd scenes at all: the game footage came from the Pac-8 college football game between Stanford and USC played on November 8, 1975.
SPOILER
Universal shot 63 additional minutes that make the sniper only a diversion allowing the theft of a multimillion-dollar art collection from a nearby museum, at a cost of $500,000. Networks were paying $2.5 million to $5 million to license films, so the extra footage was shot to command a higher fee.- Director Larry Peerce disowned the television version, which added 40 minutes of art-theft scenes and removed 45 minutes of the original, and which credits editor Gene Palmer as director and Francesca Turner as writer; both had also worked on the television version of 1974's Earthquake.
- The production employed thousands of background performers, several of whom sustained minor injuries while filming a stampede sequence. Peerce publicly complained about the extras' performances, drawing rebukes from one extra who had worked on the film and from a leader of the Screen Extras Guild.
