Trenchcoat is a live-action film produced by Walt Disney Productions in 1983 and starring Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder

Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder is a Canadian-born American actress. She is perhaps best known for playing Lois Lane in the four Superman movies opposite Christopher Reeve, a role that brought her to widespread recognition....

 as court stenographer Mickey Raymond. Widely regarded as the film that led to the launch of Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures

Touchstone Pictures is an American film production label and is one of several film labels of the Walt Disney Motion Pictures Group. Established in 1984, its releases typically feature more mature themes and darker tones than those that are released under the Walt Disney Pictures banner.Touchstone...

, the adult themes of Trenchcoat gave Disney execs pause.

Synopsis

The aspiring mystery writer Mickey Raymond (Margot Kidder

Margot Kidder

Margaret Ruth "Margot" Kidder is a Canadian-born American actress. She is perhaps best known for playing Lois Lane in the four Superman movies opposite Christopher Reeve, a role that brought her to widespread recognition....

) travels to Malta

Malta

Malta , officially known as the Republic of Malta , is a Southern European country consisting of an archipelago situated in the centre of the Mediterranean, south of Sicily, east of Tunisia and north of Libya, with Gibraltar to the west and Alexandria to the east.Malta covers just over in...

 to research her first novel and falls in love with a handsome, mysterious American (Robert Hays

Robert Hays

Robert Hays is an American actor and is arguably most well known for his role in the movie Airplane!-Life and career:...

). She is drawn into a conspiracy both fuelled by her vivid imagination and real-world drama. David Suchet

David Suchet

David Suchet, CBE, is an English actor, known for his work on British television. He is recognised for his RTS- and BPG award-winning performance as Augustus Melmotte in the 2001 British TV mini-drama The Way We Live Now, alongside Matthew Macfadyen and Paloma Baeza, and a 1991 British Academy...

 plays a local police official who seemingly is one step behind events. Raymond's odd luck leads her to become embroiled in an international plutonium smuggling ring and comedic chaos ensues

Release

The film was released on March 11, 1983 at movie theatres. Later, the movie was released on VHS

VHS

The Video Home System is a consumer-level analog recording videocassette standard developed by Victor Company of Japan ....

 and Betamax

Betamax

Betamax was a consumer-level analog videocassette magnetic tape recording format developed by Sony, released on May 10, 1975. The cassettes contain -wide videotape in a design similar to the earlier, professional wide, U-matic format...

 in 1983.

As of March 22, 2011, Trenchcoat was released to iTunes

ITunes

iTunes is a media player computer program, used for playing, downloading, and organizing digital music and video files on desktop computers. It can also manage contents on iPod, iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad....

 and Amazon.com

Amazon.com

Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...

 for digital rental, with the Walt Disney logo being re-attached to the film for the first time since its theatrical release.

Reception

The film was a box office failure, earning a total of $20,156,090.00 there. Siskel and Ebert named it one of the "Worst Films of 1983". It garnered a 3% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes

Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

.