Clue (film)
Based on Wikipedia: Clue (film)
The Murder Mystery That Refused to Die
In 1985, a movie based on a board game flopped so spectacularly that it barely broke even at the box office. Critics shrugged. Audiences stayed home. And yet, four decades later, that same film sells out theatrical screenings, commands premium prices for collector's edition releases, and remains one of the most quotable comedies ever made.
This is the strange afterlife of Clue.
The film did something genuinely unprecedented: it released to theaters with three different endings, distributed randomly across different cinemas. If you wanted to see how the mystery actually resolved, you might have to buy multiple tickets at multiple theaters. It was a marketing gimmick that critics savaged at the time—one reviewer complained that the film needed "three different middles rather than three different endings." But that very gimmick would become central to the film's eventual cult status, transforming a simple whodunit into an endlessly rewatchable puzzle box.
The Setup: Cold War Paranoia Meets Dinner Party
The year is 1954. America is deep in the grip of McCarthyism, when the mere accusation of communist sympathies could destroy a career, a family, a life. Six strangers receive mysterious invitations to a gothic New England mansion, where they're greeted by a butler named Wadsworth and assigned pseudonyms drawn straight from the board game: Colonel Mustard, Mrs. White, Mrs. Peacock, Mr. Green, Professor Plum, and Miss Scarlet.
Each of them, it turns out, has secrets. Dangerous secrets. The kind of secrets that, in 1954 America, could land you in prison or worse.
Mrs. Peacock is a senator's wife who has been taking bribes from foreign governments. Professor Plum lost his medical license for sleeping with a patient. Colonel Mustard profiteered during World War Two. Miss Scarlet runs an illegal brothel in Washington, D.C. Mrs. White has buried five husbands under suspicious circumstances. And Mr. Green? In 1954, his secret is simply that he's gay—a "crime" that could cost him his government job.
Someone has been blackmailing all of them. That someone is Mr. Boddy, who arrives at the dinner party with a proposition: he distributes weapons to the guests and suggests that one of them murder the butler to keep their secrets safe.
The lights go out. A gunshot rings out. And the bodies start piling up.
A Cast of Comedy Legends
What transforms Clue from a clever premise into an enduring classic is its ensemble cast, a murderer's row of comedy talent at the peak of their powers.
Tim Curry plays Wadsworth, the increasingly frantic butler who attempts to solve the mystery while herding a group of panicked murder suspects through an ever-growing body count. Curry wasn't the first choice for the role—director Jonathan Lynn originally wanted Leonard Rossiter, a British character actor, but Rossiter died before filming began. The second choice was Rowan Atkinson, the future Mr. Bean, but the studio worried he wasn't famous enough for American audiences. In retrospect, it's impossible to imagine anyone but Curry in the role, delivering rapid-fire exposition with theatrical flourish while physically recreating the evening's murders in an increasingly manic finale.
The guests are played by an equally remarkable ensemble. Madeline Kahn, already a comedy legend for her work in Mel Brooks films, plays Mrs. White with deadpan intensity. Her improvised monologue about "flames"—a jealous rant about her husband's mistress—became one of the film's most quoted moments. Christopher Lloyd, fresh off Back to the Future, plays Professor Plum as a cheerfully sleazy academic. Martin Mull brings pompous military bluster to Colonel Mustard. Michael McKean, later of This Is Spinal Tap fame, plays Mr. Green as a nervous government clerk with a secret. Eileen Brennan gives Mrs. Peacock aristocratic entitlement underlaid with desperation. And Lesley Ann Warren plays Miss Scarlet as the shrewdest person in the room, always three steps ahead of everyone else.
Warren wasn't originally cast in the role. Carrie Fisher—Princess Leia herself—was supposed to play Miss Scarlet, but withdrew to enter treatment for addiction. It's one of those Hollywood what-ifs that's impossible to fully imagine; Fisher would have brought something entirely different to the part.
In an unusual move for the time, every cast member received identical billing and salary, regardless of their relative fame. It reinforced the film's central conceit: any one of them could be the murderer.
How Do You End a Story Three Times?
The multiple endings weren't a last-minute gimmick. They were baked into the project from the very beginning.
John Landis, the director of An American Werewolf in London and The Blues Brothers, was originally attached to direct and developed the multiple-ending concept. He reportedly invited an impressive roster of collaborators to help write the screenplay: Tom Stoppard, the playwright behind Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead; Stephen Sondheim, the legendary Broadway composer who was also an avid mystery buff; and Anthony Perkins, who knew something about murderous plot twists from playing Norman Bates in Psycho.
The script was ultimately finished by Jonathan Lynn, a British playwright and director who took over the project. Lynn also wrote a fourth ending that never made it to screens. In this version, Wadsworth turns out to be the killer, and he's poisoned everyone's champagne. As the guests collapse, police arrive and capture Wadsworth—but he escapes in a squad car, only to be attacked by police dogs in the back seat. Lynn himself described it as "not very good."
The three endings that did make it to theaters each assign the murders differently. In one, Miss Scarlet orchestrated everything, using the maid Yvette as her accomplice before killing her too. In another, Mrs. Peacock committed all the murders to protect her reputation. In the third—eventually designated the "true" ending for home video—nearly everyone committed exactly one murder, and the real villain is revealed to be Wadsworth himself, who is actually Mr. Boddy in disguise.
That third ending also contains the film's biggest twist: Mr. Green, who spent the entire film as a nervous, closeted government employee, reveals that he's actually a straight, married F.B.I. agent who was working undercover the whole time. He draws a hidden revolver and shoots the villain, delivering the immortal line about how, actually, he's "going to go home and sleep with my wife."
A Mansion Built on a Hollywood Soundstage
The film's gothic mansion is almost a character in itself—a labyrinth of secret passages, locked rooms, and convenient murder locations. Most of it was constructed on Paramount's soundstages in Hollywood, dressed with authentic 18th and 19th century antiques borrowed from private collectors, including pieces from Theodore Roosevelt's estate.
The set was detailed enough that after filming wrapped, the producers of Dynasty—the decade's most opulent primetime soap opera—purchased it to use as a fictional hotel. In the world of 1980s television excess, the Clue mansion fit right in.
Some exteriors were filmed at a real mansion in South Pasadena, California, with matte paintings added to make the house appear larger and more imposing. That mansion was destroyed in a fire in 2005, making the film one of its few remaining records.
Director Jonathan Lynn prepared his cast by screening His Girl Friday, the 1940 screwball comedy famous for its overlapping dialogue and rapid-fire delivery. The influence shows; Clue's characters constantly talk over each other, interrupt, and deliver quips at machine-gun pace. It's a style that demands multiple viewings to catch everything—which, given the three endings, audiences were already primed to provide.
Failure and Resurrection
When Clue opened in December 1985, it barely registered. The film earned roughly $15 million against a $15 million budget—essentially breaking even, which in Hollywood accounting means losing money once marketing costs are factored in. Critics were divided at best, hostile at worst. The multiple-ending gimmick drew particular scorn; how could audiences invest in a mystery when the solution was literally random?
But something interesting happened when the film moved to home video and cable television.
On VHS and later DVD, all three endings were presented sequentially, with title cards introducing the first two as "what could have happened" before the third ending is labeled the "real" conclusion. Suddenly, the gimmick worked. Viewers could watch the same mystery resolve three different ways, comparing solutions, debating which was most satisfying. The randomness of theatrical distribution became a feature, not a bug.
Cable television, with its endless reruns, turned Clue into a shared cultural touchstone. A generation of viewers discovered the film through late-night broadcasts, watching it multiple times, memorizing the dialogue, quoting it to friends. The performances that seemed perhaps too broad for theatrical audiences played perfectly on the small screen, where Curry's theatrical gesticulations and Kahn's deadpan reactions could be appreciated in repeated viewings.
By the time the film hit its 30th anniversary in 2015, it had transformed from forgotten flop to certified cult classic. The soundtrack received a limited-edition vinyl release. A 4K restoration followed. And in 2025, for the 40th anniversary, theaters screened a different ending each day over three days, finally giving audiences the theatrical experience that had seemed like such a failure in 1985.
The Legacy of a Board Game Movie
Clue arrived decades before the current era of intellectual property adaptation, when studios routinely transform toys, theme park rides, and video games into blockbuster franchises. It was an oddity in its time—who would make a movie out of a board game?—but it established that the core appeal of the source material could translate to screen. The game's genius lies in its combinatorial possibilities: six suspects, six weapons, nine rooms, generating hundreds of possible solutions. The film captured that multiplicity by literalizing it, offering audiences three different killers using three different methods.
There have been rumors of remakes and reboots for years. Various directors and writers have been attached at different points. None have materialized, perhaps because the original's specific alchemy—that cast, that dialogue, that strange theatrical experiment—feels impossible to replicate.
The film also stands as a time capsule of American anxieties. Set in 1954 but made in 1985, it uses the McCarthy era as a backdrop for comedy about secrets and surveillance. Every character is being blackmailed for something that society has deemed shameful: sexual impropriety, political corruption, war profiteering, queerness. The joke, of course, is that these secrets aren't actually all that secret—everyone's vulnerabilities are obvious to everyone else. The blackmail scheme works only because the victims are too ashamed to compare notes.
Watched today, the film's treatment of Mr. Green's homosexuality is particularly striking. In 1954, his orientation was grounds for government termination. In 1985, the "twist" that he's actually straight played as a comedic reversal. In 2025, that same twist reads differently—almost poignantly, as a reminder of how recently queerness was considered something to be revealed as a punchline.
Why Three Endings Matter
The multiple endings of Clue anticipated something about contemporary storytelling that wouldn't become mainstream for decades: the appeal of narrative possibility space. Video games would eventually build entire genres around branching storylines and multiple endings. Television shows would spawn fan communities obsessed with alternate readings and hidden meanings. The Marvel Cinematic Universe would make the multiverse—the idea that every story happens somewhere—into a foundational concept.
Clue was there first, suggesting that a story doesn't have to resolve into a single truth. The mystery isn't diminished by having three solutions; it's enriched. Each ending casts the preceding events in a different light. Was Mrs. Peacock's nervousness guilt or fear? Was Miss Scarlet's confidence competence or psychopathy? The film invites you to watch it again with a different murderer in mind, seeing how the same performances support entirely different conclusions.
It's a parlor trick, certainly. But it's a parlor trick that has held audiences' attention for forty years.
In the end, Clue succeeded by failing. Its theatrical gimmick alienated 1985 audiences but created the conditions for its home video resurrection. Its ensemble cast meant no single star could carry the marketing, but it also meant that every character was memorable enough to quote. Its source material seemed like a creative dead end—how do you adapt a game with no characters and no story?—but that very limitation freed the filmmakers to create something strange and original.
The butler did it. Or the madam. Or the senator's wife. Or everyone.
That's the genius of Clue: in a good murder mystery, the answer matters less than the asking.