The Paper (1994 film)

The Paper is a 1994 American comedy-drama directed by Ron Howard, set over a single day at a fictional New York tabloid, the New York Sun, whose metro editor races to verify a story that could free two wrongly accused murder suspects before deadline. It was written by David Koepp and Stephen Koepp, produced by Brian Grazer and Frederick Zollo for Imagine Entertainment, and released by Universal Pictures on March 18, 1994.^{1 • 2}

Production

Howard came to the project after meeting David Koepp, then known for Jurassic Park, who was completing a script with his brother Stephen Koepp, a senior editor at Time magazine, about 24 hours in the life of a newspaper.⁶ Howard viewed deadlines as a metaphor for what people go through in daily life, and he treated the film as one that would have to be sold on word of mouth rather than concept.⁶

Research and setting. Howard spent a month of on-site research sitting in on editorial meetings at New York tabloids, including time with the Post's former editor and columnist Pete Hamill. He said the fictional Sun was built on "an amalgamation of what we were observing at the Daily News and the New York Post." One incident he observed, a Daily News reporter sitting on an unconfirmed tip that Darryl Strawberry would be investigated by the IRS, with editors pacing and pushing back deadlines on a secondary source, supplied the film's central dilemma of running a hot story that might be wrong.⁶

The film was shot entirely in New York, mainly in a Manhattan office building that doubled as the Sun newsroom. Howard brought it in at $31 million, about $1.5 million under budget and eight days ahead of schedule.⁶ Universal opened it exclusively in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, and Chicago on March 18, sneaked it into about 800 theaters the next day, and went wide on March 25.⁶

Reception

The film earned $175,507 in its domestic opening and finished with $38,824,341 domestically and $48,424,341 worldwide, about 80 percent of it from the United States.³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 86% Tomatometer from 37 reviews, with the critics consensus calling it "fast and frenetic" and crediting the cast and director for capturing the energy of the newsroom; the audience score is 67%.⁷

Contemporary critics praised its newsroom texture. Roger Ebert wrote that the film "gets a lot of things right about working on a newspaper," including how the job screws up your personal life, and called Keaton "just about perfectly cast" as an editor who cannot let a big story wait.¹⁰ The Washington Post found it "accurate to a fault about the details of newsroom life" and noted walk-ons by working journalists including Bob Costas, USA Today's Jeannie Williams, and MTV's Kurt Loder.⁹ Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote that it "never stops for breath long enough to be dull," while observing that it ultimately dissolves into slam-bang farce.^{5 • 8} Other reviewers were cooler: the Washington Post judged it no His Girl Friday and faulted its treatment of the Close character, and the Globe and Mail later wrote that the picture falls in love with its subject until "the acid drains from the wit."^{11 • 7}

Place in the newspaper-film tradition

The Paper belongs to a Hollywood tradition of newsroom films stretching back to Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's play The Front Page, which has been made and remade three times; Turan noted that at least once a decade the movies fall in love with the romance of print journalism.⁵ The Washington Post drew the comparison directly: The Front Page centers on newsmen on the eve of a hanging, while Howard's film opens with a hung-over Hackett awakening to news of a double murder, and where Hildy Johnson wants to quit the newspaper racket to marry, Hackett is pressured by his wife to leave the newsroom he loves.¹² A scholarly assessment describes the film as one that "seeks to have it both ways," immersing itself in the excitement of big-city journalism while reconciling outlaw virtues with the respectability of marriage and family.¹³

The film has remained a reference point for journalists; a Universal home-video release followed on November 18, 1997, and the title is available on digital rental and purchase.^{14 • 15}

References

1. The Paper (1994), AFI Catalog
2. The Paper, Imagine Entertainment
3. The Paper (1994), Box Office Mojo
4. The Paper (1994), JustWatch (US)
5. Kenneth Turan, "'The Paper': It's All in the Delivery," Los Angeles Times, March 18, 1994
6. "Reeling in the Years: Turning 40, Ron Howard Is Just Happy to Be Making Movies," Los Angeles Times, February 28, 1994
7. The Paper, Rotten Tomatoes
8. Kenneth Turan, "'The Paper'," Los Angeles Times, March 19, 1995
9. "'The Paper': Media Frenzy," The Washington Post, March 25, 1994
10. Roger Ebert, "The Paper," March 18, 1994
11. "Movies," The Washington Post, March 25, 1994
12. Howard Kurtz, "Hollywood's Read on Newspapers," The Washington Post, March 27, 1994
13. Thesis on journalism films, University of Canterbury
14. The Paper (1994), The Numbers
15. The Paper, Universal Pictures At Home

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

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