'Haunted Mansion': Critics hated 2003 Eddie Murphy version, and its star didn't care for it either
"Neither scary, nor funny," concluded most critics of Disney's first movie version of the famed theme park ride.
Eddie Murphy had a tough stretch at the top of the century.
There was 2002’s $100 million action-comedy The Adventures of Pluto Nash, which only made a shade of $7 million in movie theaters, becoming one of the biggest box office bombs of all time. Just three months later, an ill-fangled movie adaptation of the 1960s series I Spy also failed to recoup its $70 million budget. 2003’s Daddy Day Care fared much better, but Murphy’s fans from the days of Beverly Hills Cop, Trading Places and Coming to America lamented the toothless new direction of his career.
Then in November of 2003 came Disney’s The Haunted Mansion. Like Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which blasted into theaters four months prior to the tune of $654 million on its way to launching a multi-billion dollar franchise, the film was an ambitious “adaptation” of one of the Disney theme park’s most popular rides. And while Mansion performed admirably at the box office over the holiday season, grossing $182 million on a budget of $90 million, it was torched by critics, ultimately earning a paltry 14 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience rating (31 percent) isn’t much better with 100,000+ ratings.
“Neither scary nor funny, The Haunted Mansion is as lifeless as the ghosts in the movie,” reads the aggregator’s critical consensus of the film, which follows Jim Evers (Murphy), a realtor too busy for his wife and children (when have we ever seen that plot line in a movie?) who learns valuable lessons about the family he’s neglected when they’re summoned to the titular setting.
“It’s dreadful,” warned Ebert & Roeper’s Richard Roeper. “The Haunted Mansion is disappointing in just about every way,” wrote Jay Boyar from the Disney-adjacent Orlando Sentinel. “The PG rating is purportedly for 'frightening images,' but the only thing frightening is the bland performance Eddie Murphy phones in,” said the New York Daily News’s Jami Bernard. “Rob Minkoff has directed a movie that's nearly laughless and nowhere near as frightening as what's happened to Eddie Murphy's career,” declared the Village Voice’s Brian Parks.
Despite claims by Wikipedia editors that the film has been “reassessed” in more recent years as the movie’s core audience — kids — have grown to sing its praises, the 2003 movie’s legacy is still so dicey that even Justin Simien, the new director of a star-studded reboot hitting theaters this week, has made the rare move of distancing himself from the Murphy version in press interviews.
"I had a little bit of beef with the first film, because the first thing you've got to give the kids is the candy of the mansion that they know and love," he told Entertainment Weekly, adding that he "looked at [the film] a lot, mostly to see how easy it would be to go awry in certain spots.”
Simien (Dear White People, Bad Hair) doubled down on his thoughts on the “original” in a recent interview with Yahoo Entertainment.
“It was a kids movie that came out at a time when I was not a kid. It didn’t necessarily speak to me,” he tells us. “But, you know, Eddie Murphy is a comedic genius, and Rob Minkoff is a genius. It didn't necessarily speak to me, so I think when I started to make this movie, I revisited that movie and I revisited specifically the production design and some of the research that they did, because I wanted to kind of see what their thinking was, and where they sort of fell short of their own goals. This is not shade, this is happens on every movie. You always fall short of your initial ambition and vision. But [I wanted to] sort of figure out what problems they ran into, that kind of stuff. But at a certain point, I had to put that movie aside.”
Even Murphy himself will tell you his modest box office hit wasn’t up to snuff.
"I did a Haunted Mansion movie, and it wasn't very good, so I don't know if they want to bring the old baggage and have me stinking up the new one," Murphy told Entertainment Tonight in January when asked if he might cameo in Simien’s version. "My Haunted Mansion was not all that and a bag of chips."
Good news for Disney fans, though: Simien’s version, hitting theaters Friday with a starry ensemble that includes LaKeith Stanfield, Rosario Dawson, Owen Wilson, Tiffany Haddish, Danny De Vito and Jamie Lee Curtis, is drawing early praise from critics — particularly when compared to the 2003 edition.
“The second time’s the charm for Disney’s Haunted Mansion,” proclaims The Boston Globe. “Justin Simien’s Spooky Comedy is a Ghoulish Delight,” reads Collider’s headline. “Justin Simien brings fresh life to fright-filled franchise,” says Mashable.
As for Murphy, he survived that ghoulish stretch in his career just fine. He was stacking plenty of cash from his voicework in the Shrek movies that decade, and earned his first and only Oscar nomination in 2007 for his supposed “comeback” in Dreamgirls. In more recent years, he drew similarly strong reviews for his dramatic work in Dolemite Is My Name (2019), while Coming 2 America (2021) and You People (2023) have both been streaming hits.
And as Simien says, he’s still a comedic genius.
Watch the trailer for Simien's Haunted Mansion:
Haunted Mansion opens in theaters Friday, July 28.
