An American Werewolf in Paris

The film's title has its roots in the production of its predecessor; when production of the original London film ran into trouble with British Equity, director John Landis, having scouted locations in Paris, considered moving the production to France and changing the title of his film to An American Werewolf in Paris.[5]

In 1991, Landis was approached by PolyGram Pictures to develop a sequel to the first movie, he wrote a first draft, which would have focused on Debbie Klein (a character mentioned in the original film) getting a job in London, and her subsequent investigation into the deaths of David and Jack, several characters from the original film, including Alex Price, Dr. Hirsch, and Sgt. McManus would have returned, but the studio turned down the script, as Landis recalled in an interview,

"They hated it, they hated the script, it really was odd, it was not conventional in any way, they were horrified, and I thought that was a good reaction to a horror script, but they were aghast: they thought it was too outré"

At this point, Landis and the studio had parted company, with him stating, "OK, I don’t want to know, just send me a check."[6][7][8][9][10]

Around the same time, writer/director John Lafia had written and submitted his own draft to the studio while he left to go work on Child's Play 2, the storyline for Lafia's draft focused on a schoolteacher in Paris who holds forth on good and evil in a class he teaches. The teacher is bitten by a lycanthrope and goes through the expected changes, while on his trail is the doctor from the first film, who has been working on a werewolf serum. In an interview with Fangoria, Lafia states that the studio was not interested in his script, explaining, "It was kind of a metaphor for things like AIDS and cancer; it had the same attitude as the first film, along with plenty of really scary stuff, [and] as it stands now, it will most likely never be made, which is too bad"[11]

After Landis left the project, Tom Stern and Tim Burns, who had previously worked on the short-lived MTV series The Idiot Box and the 1993 comedy film Freaked, were hired to write a new script, with Stern set as director.

On being hired to write the script, Stern recalled:

"It was a great challenge to do a sequel that didn't just repeat the original, I wanted to find a way to get around the basic werewolf storyline-it's always about a guy who's bitten by a werewolf and starts turning into one, and he kills people and becomes upset by it, and he's usually killed at the end. In our script, that's the first act"

Stern and Burns's script followed a young American named Andy McDermott, who's vacationing in Spain when he's called to Paris after hearing that his uncle was savaged by a mysterious beast there, as Stern recalled in an interview: "Once he arrives, He's pulled into this nightmare by several characters who knew his uncle, and before you know it, he's deep into the Parisian werewolf experience." As part of the preproduction process, Stern had makeup effects (FX) artists Steve Johnson and Tony Gardner work on preliminary designs for the monster, which the writers have described as "A 100-percent killing machine, an awesome, huge, 600-pound werewolf, the biggest, meanest predator on land", and Phil Tippett, who had worked on Jurassic Park, was going to use computer graphics to bring the beast to life for full-body shots, while the closer stuff would be the makeup FX crew using animatronic heads. Once they turned in their script to the studio, the studio informed Stern that while they liked the script, he was no longer going to be directing the film. As Stern mentioned in an Interview:

"They were planning to do it on, a medium-low budget, around $10-12 million, and they felt comfortable with me directing it at that level," he reports. "Then when I handed it in, they liked it so much that they wanted to do it on a higher budget, and they needed a big-name director they could use the foreign presales, since Polygram, which owns Propaganda, is a foreign company. When I write a script, I conceive every scene as a director, but now that power has been taken away from me, and I can't say how it's going to end up. It's ironic, because the only reason this movie's going is because we wrote a screenplay everybody loved, and the first thing they did to thank us was to kick me off the picture. They don't think about the creative aspects of the film they don't think, 'Is this the right guy to do this kind of movie?' They just think, well, we need somebody who's had a big hit"

Marco Brambilla, whose film Demolition Man was a major international hit, was then brought on to take over directing; not long after, both Stern and Burns moved on to other projects[12][13][14]

The project fell into limbo for about two years, and during that time, 12 screenwriters, including Larry Brothers, Neal Purvis, and Robert Wade had done their own rewrites on Stern and Burn's script, with Purvis and Wade contributing the danger tour and the bungee jump off the Eiffel Tower. During the hiatus, Brambilla left, and was replaced by Anthony Waller, who had gained a cult following for his low-budget thriller Mute Witness. Upon joining the project, Waller had rewritten the script, after the arbitration process, the final screenplay credit went to Stern, Burns, and Waller[15][16]

Filming took place in Amsterdam, Luxembourg, Metz, and New York City, and on location in Paris.[17]

In an alternate ending, after Andy eats Claude's heart, Serafine has a vision of her stepfather in the back of an ambulance, explaining how he found a cure before his death. The closing scene shows Andy and Chris visiting Serafine at a hospital, where she has given birth to a child, whose eyes shift to look like the werewolves'; another version of the alternate ending features Inspector LeDuc (in Chris's place) at the hospital.

In its opening weekend, the film ranked seventh in the United States and Canada box office and third among new releases, earning $7.6 million.[18][19] By the end of its run, Paris grossed $26.6 million from a $25 million budget.[4]

On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 7% based on reviews from 29 critics, with an average rating of 3.72/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Markedly inferior to its cult classic predecessor in every way, An American Werewolf in Paris is felled by the silver bullets of clumsy storytelling and chintzy special effects."[20] On Metacritic, it has a score of 31 out of 100 based on reviews from 13 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[21]

Unlike its predecessor, which had Oscar-winning special make-up effects by Rick Baker, Paris relied heavily on CGI for its transformation effects and chase sequences, a common point of derision from most critics.[22][23]

The film was nominated for Worst Sequel at the 1997 Stinkers Bad Movie Awards, but lost to Speed 2: Cruise Control.[24]

John Landis, the director of An American Werewolf in London, did not like the movie, saying, "I was really disappointed when I saw that film, I thought it was lousy".[25]