General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Big Business

Big Business is a 1988 American comedy directed by Jim Abrahams for Touchstone Pictures, in which Bette Midler and Lily Tomlin each play two roles: two sets of identical twins, the Sheltons and the Ratliffs, who are mixed up at birth in a rural West Virginia hospital and cross paths forty years later in New York.¹ It was Abrahams's first film directed without his longtime collaborators David and Jerry Zucker.²

Key fact	Detail
Release	June 10, 1988, Touchstone Pictures (The Walt Disney Company)¹
Director	Jim Abrahams, his first solo directorial effort after co-directing Airplane! (1980), Top Secret! (1984), and Ruthless People (1986)²
Stars	Bette Midler (Sadie Shelton/Sadie Ratliff), Lily Tomlin (Rose Shelton/Rose Ratliff), Fred Ward (Roone Dimmick), Edward Herrmann (Graham Sherbourne)¹
Writers	Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel, inspired by Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors²
Runtime	93 minutes per the AFI Catalog; other listings give 94, 97, or 98 minutes²^•³^•⁴
Box office	$39.6 million gross in the United States⁵
Rating	PG⁵

Spoilers

Plot

In the 1940s, a wealthy New York couple passing through rural West Virginia and a local working-class couple both give birth to twin girls in the same small hospital, where a nurse accidentally mixes up the babies. One daughter from each pair goes home with the wrong family.⁶

Forty years later, the mismatched sets have grown into Rose and Sadie Shelton, heirs running their late father's New York conglomerate Moramax, and Rose and Sadie Ratliff, raised in the small town of Jupiter Hollow, whose economy depends on the local furniture maker Hollowmade, a Moramax subsidiary.⁴ When Sadie Shelton, the company's chief executive, prepares to sell Hollowmade to an Italian investor interested in strip-mining the area, the Ratliff sisters travel to New York to protest the sale at Moramax's stockholders' meeting.⁷

Both pairs of twins check into the Plaza Hotel, where the film's central farce unfolds: the four women are repeatedly mistaken for one another by hotel staff, executives, suitors, and Italian businessmen, while each set barely misses meeting the other.¹^•⁸ The film's running joke is that one sister in each pair thrives in her setting while the other wilts: the country-raised Sadie longs for city glamour, while the city-raised Rose yearns for a simpler life.⁹

Production

First cousins and writing partners Dori Pierson and Marc Rubel drew on Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors and researched stories of identical twins separated at birth; the four lead characters were named after Rubel's mother, Sadie, and her fraternal twin sister, Rose.² Silver Screen Partners III agreed in February 1987 to fund the film as part of a slate of eighteen Disney productions, and Midler joined under a three-picture deal with Touchstone, with Tomlin signing soon after.²

Principal photography began on August 10, 1987 in New York City, including several days of Plaza Hotel exteriors and location work in East Harlem, before production moved to Burbank, California, where the hotel's suites and lobby were re-created on Disney sound stages.²^•¹⁰ Before release, Touchstone considered changing the title to Double Trouble but decided against it.²

The special-effects crew first tried dressing body doubles with full-face prosthetics and wigs so that Midler and Tomlin would not have to appear in every scene; the finished film instead relies on compositing to place the two Midlers and two Tomlins on screen together, most notably in a mirror scene that critics traced to the Marx Brothers' Duck Soup.²^•¹¹

Reception

Critical response was divided. Roger Ebert, the Chicago Sun-Times critic and 1975 Pulitzer Prize winner, gave the film two stars, arguing that the long sequences of twins narrowly missing each other in the hotel were tedious and that the screenplay never delivered the payoff scene when all four women finally meet.³ The Washington Post's Rita Kempley called it "doubly disappointing," finding Tomlin overpowered by Midler's performance.⁷ Other reviewers were warmer: the Deseret News praised the dual performances as "nothing short of terrific" and the visual effects as "amazing,"¹² and the critic Pauline Kael reportedly said the film almost made her fall off her seat laughing, though the Slant Magazine retrospective still called it uneven.⁹

Audience measures have stayed moderate: IMDb records a 6.4/10 rating from about 17,000 users.¹³ The film grossed $39.6 million in the United States.⁵ It was released on video in 1989¹ and on DVD in 2002.¹¹

Legacy

Retrospective commentary treats the film chiefly as a showcase for its two leads. Slant Magazine's 2013 essay called it "in a class all its own" as a display of Midler's comic range, from corporate bombast to vulnerability, while noting that the farce machinery eventually chokes on its own intricacies.⁹ The Film Society of Lincoln Center screened it in 2019 as part of a Lily Tomlin retrospective, crediting both actresses with pivoting nimbly between dual roles.⁴ Jim Abrahams, who also co-created Airplane! and The Naked Gun with the Zucker brothers, died in November 2024 at his home in Santa Monica, California, at age 80.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1980s › Satirical, black, and parody comedies of the 1980s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

Notice something wrong?