The Long Kiss Goodnight turns 30 this week, and the Renny Harlin action thriller still feels like a cult 90s favourite. Geena Davis stars as Samantha Caine, a small-town schoolteacher who discovers she is really an expert CIA assassin named Charly Baltimore; Samuel L. Jackson is the down-on-his-luck private eye who gets pulled into her hunt for answers. The making of the film is nearly as wild as the plot. Here are eight things you didn’t know.
Mitch was meant to die
In an early cut of the film, Mitch Henessey died. At a test screening, an audience member shouted, “You can’t kill Sam Jackson!” Renny Harlin changed the final cut so that Samuel L. Jackson’s character survived.
A then-record script sale
In 1994, New Line Cinema paid a then-record US$4 million (equivalent to $8.7 million in 2025) for Shane Black’s script. That screenplay was a big reason Harlin later called the film his favourite: “For me, it’s just very simple. It’s a movie that had a really good screenplay, which meant that I was able to get really good actors.”
A 127-year-old hotel caught fire
On February 27, 1996, during filming at the 127-year-old Windermere House in Ontario, Canada, a fire broke out, leaving only the stone verandah intact. There was speculation that it was caused by film lighting; however, it may have been a short circuit. When the fire started, filming was taking place on the frozen lake, with the house lighted from within to be seen in the background. It is unknown whether the fire was directly associated with filming, but the building was otherwise closed for the winter.
The real fire scrapped the fire scenes
Ironically, some of the remaining scenes there involved fire, but the real fire prevented them from being shot. The film crew helped evacuate nearby homes, but the fire did not spread beyond the building. The house was rebuilt and its support buildings were expanded the next year.
It opened third at the box office
Over its opening weekend, the film grossed $9,065,363 from 2,245 theaters, coming in third among films opening that weekend. It grossed $33,447,612 in the US and Canada and $62,009,149 internationally, for a worldwide gross of $95,456,761. Some suggested the poor advertising campaign and lukewarm critical reception may have been a carry-over effect from Renny Harlin and Geena Davis’s previous collaboration, Cutthroat Island, which was released 10 months earlier and was one of the biggest box office bombs of all time.
The studio blamed confusing ads
Renny Harlin blamed the film’s poor performance on confusing advertising. Shane Black wondered if it might have been more successful if it were about a man: “It might have made more money, they told me, but it had to be a woman. The lead had to be female.”
The reviews split down the middle
The Long Kiss Goodnight received mainly positive reviews, but the numbers are split. It holds a 67% approval rating at Rotten Tomatoes based on 61 reviews, with an average rating of 6/10. On Metacritic, the film has a score of 44 out of 100 based on reviews from 20 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film a median grade of “A−” on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert gave it 2 and a half out of 4 stars, stating, “I admired it as an example of craftsmanship, but what a lot of time and money to spend on something of no real substance.”
The people who made it still love it
Geena Davis said: “I love that movie. My character might be my favorite role—it’s a close call between Thelma and that one.” Samuel L. Jackson stated that The Long Kiss Goodnight was his favorite movie to watch that he was in. Renny Harlin said the film was his favourite of all the films he made: “It’s always challenging to make a movie, but it sure makes it easier when you have a good screenplay like in that one.”
Which of these behind-the-scenes facts is your favourite? Tell us the one you’ll be sharing on the next rewatch.
Facts from Wikipedia: The Long Kiss Goodnight, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
