General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Leonard Part 6

Leonard Part 6 is a 1987 American comedy that spoofs secret agent and spy films, starring Bill Cosby as retired CIA operative Leonard Parker. Cosby produced the film and wrote the story, Jonathan Reynolds wrote the screenplay, and Paul Weiland, a British commercials director making his feature debut, directed it for Columbia Pictures. Released on December 18, 1987, it opened to scathing reviews, a weak box office, and three Golden Raspberry Awards, and Cosby publicly told audiences not to see it before it premiered.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	December 18, 1987, Los Angeles and New York; rated PG; 80 minutes per the AFI Catalog (IMDb lists 85 minutes)¹^•²
Principal cast	Bill Cosby (Leonard Parker), Tom Courtenay (Frayn), Gloria Foster (Medusa Johnson), Joe Don Baker (Snyderburn), Moses Gunn (Giorgio), Pat Colbert (Allison Parker)¹
Box office	$1,316,337 opening weekend on 1,142 screens; $4,615,255 total domestic gross, all of it domestic³
Cost	An estimated $24 million budget, including Cosby's $6 million salary, plus a $5 million promotional campaign; the Deseret News called it a "$27 million movie turkey"¹^•⁴
Razzies	Won Worst Picture, Worst Actor (Cosby), and Worst Screenplay (Reynolds and Cosby); Gloria Foster nominated for Worst Supporting Actress and Paul Weiland for Worst Director¹
Critical scores	7% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 15 reviews; 21% audience score⁵

Spoilers

Plot and premise

The film presents itself as the sixth entry in a series that does not exist. In the opening narration, the butler Frayn (Tom Courtenay) tells the audience that the first five installments of Leonard's espionage adventures were confiscated for world security reasons.¹

Leonard Parker, a former CIA super-spy, now runs an upscale restaurant in San Francisco. He retired seven years earlier after his wife Allison left him, and he still hopes to win her back. The CIA lures him out of retirement when the criminal mastermind Medusa Johnson, a committed vegetarian, discovers a way to control ordinary animals and turn them into killers; she has already killed several CIA agents with them, and the agency fears an assault on the Bay Area within three days. Leonard refuses a $6 million offer to help, while at home his twenty-year-old daughter Joan, an aspiring actress, announces her intention to marry Giorgio Frann Dorsey, her sixty-six-year-old theater director.¹ The villainess's animal attacks give the film its signature imagery, including lobsters, frogs, and fish turned against people.⁶

Production

According to promotional information in AMPAS library files cited by the AFI Catalog, Cosby conceived the story while on vacation in Southern France and sold the idea to Steve Sohmer, then president of Columbia Pictures, who put it into development. Principal photography began April 15, 1987, by which time Sohmer had left the studio presidency and served as a producer on the film; he received the unusual credit "executive producer for Mr. Cosby." A Columbia spokesperson said the credit was negotiated between Cosby, Sohmer, and the studio, while a spokesperson for Cosby suggested it was either ego-based or tied to a feud with David Puttnam, who replaced Sohmer as president.¹

The film was shot entirely on location in the San Francisco Bay Area. Four mansions in Piedmont, near Oakland, stood in for the homes of Leonard and his estranged wife, the exterior of the International Tuna company was built in the Alameda shipyards, and sound stages were constructed in an unused factory in Berkeley. Many live animals were cast, including sheep, ostriches, an anteater, and a capybara; when the lobsters did not perform as needed, fifty mechanical lobsters were built for the scene in which Cosby's character is attacked by them.¹

The crew included cinematographer Jan DeBont, editor Gerry Hambling, production designer Geoffrey Kirkland, and composer Elmer Bernstein. The songs include "Without You (Love Theme From 'Leonard Part 6')," written by Lamont Dozier and performed by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle.¹

Release and Cosby's disavowal

The film's release was troubled from the start. Two weeks before it opened, Cosby appeared on the Larry King Live talk show on CNN and advised people not to see it, saying he was unhappy with the final version and placing much of the blame on Columbia president David Puttnam, who had installed employees loyal to him in key positions including director and producer. Puttnam was fired from Columbia shortly before the film's release. The Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reported a rumor that Cosby had offered Columbia $10 million in cash and another $10 million in personal endorsement time not to release the film, an offer that would have covered most of the production costs but not the promotional campaign.¹

Distribution suffered further when theaters owned by the Cineplex Odeon chain, the fourth largest in the United States, refused to run the film in retaliation for Columbia changing release plans for The Last Emperor days before that film was scheduled to open. Columbia responded with a limited-release pattern in larger cities rather than the planned nationwide rollout.¹

It opened on 1,142 screens and took in about $1.3 million in its first three days, ranking tenth for the weekend; its second weekend fell 20 percent, and the total domestic gross reached $4,615,255.¹^•³ Rumors persisted that Cosby bought the television rights to keep the film off the air, but it made its network television debut on CBS on April 24, 1990.²

Reception

Reviews were overwhelmingly negative. The Los Angeles Times survey of local critics found it hard to locate a kind word: the L.A. Daily News wrote that "the only good thing about 'Leonard Part 6' is that it all but assures there will not be a Leonard Part 7," Todd McCarthy in Daily Variety observed that Columbia had managed two flops of Ishtar's kind in a single year, and the paper's own critic called the film "a smug, tedious exercise in self-indulgence." Critics also attacked the heavy product placement, particularly the Coca-Cola bottles, Coke being Columbia's parent company.⁶ The Washington Post opened its review with the line "The only good thing about Bill Cosby's 'Leonard Part 6' is that we didn't have to see Parts 1 through 5."⁷

At the eighth Golden Raspberry Awards, held the night before the 1988 Oscars, the film led the field with three wins: Worst Picture, Worst Actor for Cosby, and Worst Screenplay for Reynolds and Cosby. Cosby did not attend the ceremony but displayed his three awards months later on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, announcing, "I swept the awards!" In 2005 the film received an additional Razzie nomination for "Worst Comedy of Our First 25 Years."¹ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 7% Tomatometer from 15 reviews and a 21% audience score, and retrospective critics have ranked it among the worst films ever made.⁵

Legacy

The film has remained a reference point for big-budget studio failures. Its combination of a star who wrote the story and produced it, a first-time feature director, an estimated $24 million budget against a $4.6 million gross, and the star's own public disavowal made it a recurring case study in accounts of 1980s Hollywood misfires, and it is regularly cited in discussions of the Golden Raspberry Awards, whose Worst Picture roll it joined for 1987.³^•²^•⁸ A 1988 lawsuit by stagehand John Chaplin against Cosby and others over injuries sustained on the production was reported by Daily Variety; no further information about its outcome was found by the AFI Catalog.¹

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

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