Who was the original star? : The Golden Child (1986)

Before Paramount decided Eddie Murphy was ‘The Chosen One’, they had their sights set on a rising young action-movie lead from downunder.

In 1985, Mel Gibson was the then toast of the town, and the first name on everybody’s white board of casting suggestions when it came to action vehicles. And at the time, that’s what Dennis Feldman’s script for “The Golden Child” was – a very serious adventure drama, not at all unlike the films that had landed Gibson on Hollywood’s radar, “Mad Max” and its two sequels.

But with “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome” again top of the box office at the time, and Gibson suddenly getting more and more offers from the big US studios, the Peekskill-born actor found himself in the fortunate position of being able to pick and choose his projects. With Gibson’s dance card now starting to fill, Paramount decided they wouldn’t wait for their first pick and instead went in another direction- casting comedy king Eddie Murphy to play Chandler Jarrell instead.

Gibson, who would also later nix the role of Elliot Ness in “The Untouchables” (1987) and John McClane in “Die Hard” (1988), would hold out another year before selecting his post ‘post-Thunderdome’ project – ultimately settling on a little action script titled “Lethal Weapon” for his next project.

The only element of the originally proposed dream team for “The Golden Child” that Eddie Murphy decided to keep was director George Miller – who had worked with Gibson on three “Mad Max” films – with the rest (the more serious-skewed script, for one) being tossed out. But when Murphy decided it’d be OK to make the Australian filmmaker wait for him for four hours, at a planned meeting spot to talk about the project, Miller felt disrespected and immediately nixed the project.

Murphy’s next pick, John Carpenter, was also uninterested – and no surprise, he had his own similar-themed supernatural comedy (“Big Trouble in Little China”) in development. Michael Ritchie, who had just worked with Murphy’s “Saturday Night Live” co-star Chevy Chase on “Fletch” (1985), was ultimately hired for “The Golden Child”.

While the film didn’t turn out so crash hot – Murphy would later go on to slam it when giving interviews for his 1988 release “Coming to America” – Paramount scored a nice hit with “Golden Child”, seeing it go on to make $79,817,937 in the U.S. alone.