Development The original script was written by
Peter Lenkov, who retained a story by credit. Selling the spec script of
Demolition Man to Warner Bros. was his first big break. Lenkov had been inspired by
Lethal Weapon and wanted to do something about cops. He was also influenced by stories of celebrities being
cryogenically frozen and listening to
Sting's song "
Demolition Man" on repeat due to a broken cassette player in his car. His initial pitch was rejected by an executive who did not understand his "frozen cop" idea. The finished script, where a super cop has to battle the world's deadliest criminal, in a future where there is almost no crime, generated more interest. Writer
Daniel Waters (known for
Heathers) said his version of the screenplay was essentially a rewrite; he changed the script so extensively that when the script
went to arbitration he received first screenplay writing credit. In the early drafts the script was a regular action movie, with no attempt at comedy. Waters pitched it as an action movie version of Woody Allen's
Sleeper. Waters had an idea about a small part of
Universal City, a shopping and entertainment area called
CityWalk, and wondered what it might be like if one day all of Los Angeles might be like that, and the idea grew from there. Waters says his intention was to have fun, that he was not trying to be political or deeply examine
political correctness. He cited the conclusion of the film, where society will need to find a new balance and compromise, as representing his own position in the political middle ground. A joke was cut from the script, where after using the three seashells and washing his hands Spartan was confronted by the same ineffective hand dryer from his own time. Jonathan Lemkin also did uncredited rewrites on the film.
Steven de Souza read the script but was unavailable to commit to rewrites. De Souza recommended setting the film in the more distant future to make the culture clash more plausible. Producers rejected his suggestion because they wanted to keep the subplot of Spartan finding his daughter, but ultimately that subplot was cut from the film. The script had been in development for six years before filming finally began. Brambilla met Stallone a few days after getting attached to the project and started re-writing the script with Daniel Waters. The film went into production approximately eight months after that.
Casting Stallone passed on the project at first, but came back around to it. He liked the idea of two equal opponents in Spartan and Phoenix, and decided to take a chance on doing something he had not done before. Stallone wanted
Jackie Chan for the role of Simon Phoenix. Chan turned it down, not wanting to play a villain.
Wesley Snipes turned down the role several times, so Joel Silver and Marco Brambilla went to the set of the film
Rising Sun to try and convince him in person. Brambilla explained what he thought the film could be and his passion for the script they were writing, and the next day they received a call and Snipes agreed to do the film. Brambilla said of Snipes, "He works without rehearsing too much, and he improvises a lot. The two of them, that combination of energies and the way they interact, really did the movie a lot of favors. They completely respected each other and were really professional, and they did get along. There was no ego or any competition between the actors." Petty attributed it to personality differences, as she and Stallone did not get along, and said "Sly and I were like oil and water." Silver was looking for a replacement and
Lorenzo di Bonaventura recommended Bullock; impressed by her audition tape, Silver hired her.
Denis Leary said he was hired for his comedy rants, which he wrote himself and had to undergo a long approval process by the studio before it was included in the script.
Nigel Hawthorne took the role to raise his profile, as he was primarily known as a television and stage actor. Having missed out on the lead role in
Shadowlands to Anthony Hopkins, he wanted to make sure he was chosen for the film adaptation of
The Madness of King George.
Filming General Motors provided the production team with 18 concept vehicles, including the
Ultralite. More than 20 fiberglass replicas of the Ultralite were produced to portray civilian and SAPD patrol vehicles in the film. After filming had completed, the remaining Ultralites were returned to Michigan as part of GM's concept vehicle fleet. The City of L.A. allowed the filmmakers to use and demolish an old Department of Water & Power building in downtown Los Angeles. This enabled them to have more control over the explosion, instead of having to cut straight to the building being gone and rubble as they had been forced to do with other projects. "We actually created a crater in the middle of the building. And have the explosion and rubble more designed, so to speak. It's fun to do that, because those big pyrotechnics always look great", Silver noted. The film suffered repeated delays, and the original 72-day production schedule ran to 112 days. The production went through five assistant directors, and many crew had to leave to work on other projects. Insiders at Warner Bros. were critical of Silver for hiring a director without previous feature film experience. Silver rejected this view, saying, "Marco's done a brilliant job. We're over-schedule because this is a very hard movie to make, not because Marco is inexperienced." in downtown Los Angeles. was used as Sunrise Court, Lenina Huxley's apartment building.
Demolition Man was the first production to film at the
Los Angeles Convention Center after it was rebuilt in the 1990s, it was used as the Cocteau Center. The S.A.P.D. police station in the background was the
GTE Corporate Headquarters in
Westlake Village, California (which later became the
Baxter Healthcare building, and was used in the first episode of
The Orville). The
Pacific Design Center, in West Hollywood was used for the exterior shot of Lenina Huxley's apartment building. The cryo-prison used the exterior of the
Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles. Filming also took place at Wilshire Courtyard, 5700 and 5750
Wilshire Boulevard. A power station in
Eagle Rock, Los Angeles, was used as the underground dwellings of Edgar Friendly and the Scraps. The helicopter bungee jump at the start of the film was coordinated by Charles Picerni, and performed by stuntman Ken Bates. For safety, and due to the danger of recoil back into the helicopter blades, a decelerator was used instead of a real bungee, and Bates jumped from a
Chinook helicopter. According to Picerni it was a first: "We've done that off of buildings before, but never out of a helicopter." One of the film's focal points is
Taco Bell being the sole surviving restaurant chain after "the franchise wars." The European version of the film substitutes Taco Bell with
Pizza Hut, because Taco Bell is not as well known outside the United States and Canada; both restaurant chains were owned at the time by
PepsiCo. Lines were re-dubbed and logos changed during post-production. According to
The Wall Street Journal, this kind of
localization of product placement was a first. The film was
green-lit with a production budget of $45 million. The cost increased to $77 million after the shooting schedule was extended. The combined cost of production and marketing was estimated at nearly $97 million. == Marketing ==