The Strange History of Eyewitness (1981): Knife Attacks, Box Office Failure, and a Bollywood Remake

Forgotten Film History

A Real-Life Knife Attack on Set

Sometimes the behind-the-scenes story is more thrilling than the movie itself. That’s the case with Peter Yates’ Eyewitness (1981), a thriller starring William Hurt, Sigourney Weaver, and Christopher Plummer.

While shooting at New York’s Metropolitan Life Building, the cast and crew suddenly found themselves in the middle of a genuine crime. On June 1, 1980, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner reported that a man wielding a knife chased a wounded man into the building—straight into the middle of filming.

The surreal moment stunned the crew, but the attacker quickly fled when he spotted the film’s cameras. The victim was treated by paramedics, and in a twist worthy of the movies, a WNEW-TV news crew happened to be filming a story about Eyewitness at the same time and captured the incident on tape.

It’s a bizarre anecdote that almost overshadows the movie itself—and maybe explains why Eyewitness is remembered more for its chaos than its cinematic suspense.

⸻

A Movie with Too Many Names

Before it even hit theaters, Eyewitness had an identity crisis. The project was originally titled The Janitor, a reference to William Hurt’s character, who works as a custodian in a Manhattan office building and witnesses a murder. At one point, the title shifted to The Janitor Doesn’t Dance, a mouthful that confused preview audiences. Finally, the studio settled on the more generic Eyewitness.

The shifting titles reveal the studio’s uncertainty about how to market the movie. Was it a gritty thriller? A character-driven romance between Hurt and Weaver? Or a political conspiracy story involving Plummer’s wealthy industrialist? The answer seemed to be “all of the above,” and the result left audiences unsure of what they were buying a ticket for.

⸻

A Box Office Misfire

Despite a cast that included two rising stars (Hurt fresh off Altered States, Weaver just after Alien), Eyewitness failed to connect. Reportedly budgeted at $8 million, the movie earned only around $2 million at the U.S. box office.

Part of the problem may have been timing. 1981 was a strong year for thrillers, with Body Heat making a splash just months later and raising the bar for neo-noir suspense. Compared to that film’s heat and confidence, Eyewitness felt lukewarm—interesting but unfocused.

Still, it marked an early collaboration between actors who would go on to become 1980s icons. For fans of Hurt and Weaver, the film stands as a curious stepping stone.

⸻

Bollywood Picks It Up

If American audiences didn’t embrace Eyewitness, the movie found an unlikely second life in India. Nearly two decades later, the 2000 Hindi thriller Hum To Mohabbat Karega was directly inspired by Yates’ film.

The Bollywood version, starring Bobby Deol and Karisma Kapoor, took the same premise of an ordinary man entangled in a murder case but retooled it with musical numbers and local flair. It’s a strange cultural twist: a forgotten American box office flop reborn as a colorful Bollywood romance-thriller.

⸻

Legacy: More Backstory Than Story

Today, Eyewitness lives on not for its plot but for its peculiar legacy. It’s a film where the trivia is more entertaining than the drama on screen: a production interrupted by a real knife attack, a title that changed three times, a financial flop that somehow inspired a Bollywood remake.

In the end, Eyewitness is best appreciated as a curiosity piece of 1980s cinema—a reminder that sometimes the most lasting stories about a movie aren’t the ones told in the script, but the ones that happen around it.

⸻

⭐ Stars: 2.5 out of 5 — Interesting cast and production lore, but an unfocused thriller that couldn’t find its audience.