The Hudsucker Proxy - Release

Release

Warner Bros. held test screenings and audience comments were largely mixed. The studio suggested re-shoots, but the Coens, who held final cut privilege, refused because they were very nervous working with their biggest budget to date and were eager for mainstream success. The producers eventually added footage that had been cut and also shot minor pick-ups for the ending. Variety magazine claimed that the pick-ups were done to try to save the film because Warner feared it was going to be a box office bomb. Joel Coen addressed the issue in an interview: "First of all, they weren't reshoots. They were a little bit of additional footage. We wanted to shoot a fight scene at the end of the movie. It was the product of something we discovered editing the movie, not previewing it. We've done additional shooting on every movie, so it's normal."

The film premiered in January 1994 at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah. In addition, The Hudsucker Proxy was screened at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival on May 12, 1994. The film was in competition for the Palme d'Or, but lost to Pulp Fiction. The Hudsucker Proxy was released on March 11, 1994, and only grossed $2,816,518 in the United States. The production budget was officially set at $25 million, although, it was reported to have increased to $40 million for marketing and promotion purposes. Nonetheless, the film was a box office bomb. Response from critics were also mixed. Based on 39 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, 56% of the reviewers enjoyed the film.

Roger Ebert praised the production design, scale model work, matte paintings, cinematography, and characters. "But the problem with the movie is that it's all surface and no substance," Ebert wrote. "Not even the slightest attempt is made to suggest that the film takes its own story seriously. Everything is style. The performances seem deliberately angled as satire." Desson Thomson of The Washington Post described The Hudsucker Proxy as being "pointlessly flashy and compulsively overloaded with references to films of the 1930s. Missing in this film's performances is a sense of humanity, the crucial ingredient in the movies Hudsucker is clearly trying to evoke. Hudsucker isn't the real thing at all. It's just a proxy."

Todd McCarthy, writing in Variety, called the film "one of the most inspired and technically stunning pastiches of old Hollywood pictures ever to come out of the New Hollywood. But a pastiche it remains, as nearly everything in the Coen brothers' latest and biggest film seems like a wizardly but artificial synthesis, leaving a hole in the middle where some emotion and humanity should be." James Berardinelli gave a largely positive review. "The Hudsucker Proxy skewers Big Business on the same shaft that Robert Altman ran Hollywood through with The Player. From the Brazil-like scenes in the cavernous mail room to the convoluted machinations in the board room, this film is pure satire of the nastiest and most enjoyable sort. In this surreal world of 1958 can be found many of the issues confronting large corporations in the 1990s, all twisted to match the filmmakers' vision."

Warner Home Video released The Hudsucker Proxy on DVD in May 1999. No featurettes were included. It was announced in November 2012 that it will be one of the first Blu-Ray Disc titles released through the Warner Archive Collection.