Trivia / My Stepmother Is an Alien

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $26 million. Box office, $13,854,000 (domestic). It was probably a victim of poor timing and too much competition as it opened the same day as Twins (1988) and only a week after the releases of The Naked Gun and Scrooged.
• Completely Different Title: In Greece the movie became "Η Σεξογήινη", a pun combining "sex" and "alien", roughly translated as "(she-) Sexalien".
• Creator Killer: One of a handful of 1988/1989 films that caused the Weintraub Entertainment Group to implode right out of the gates, and one of the movies that ended Coca-Cola's control over Columbia and caused their merger with Tristar and Sony.
• Executive Meddling: The film was supposed to be about child abuse, using the concept of an evil alien to build as a metaphor for this touchy topic. Said screenwriter Jerico Stone: "I wanted to reach kids in a way that wouldn't make the story just a disease-of-the-week TV movie. And after certain incidents I'd experienced, I realized I could tell the story as a fable, a fairy tale that would make it easier for kids to grasp the child abuse angle." The film didn't turn out that way, as it was rewritten as a silly comedy instead of a horror film, at the behest of Paramount, who subsequently turned it down. It ended up at Weintraub Entertainment Group, and (like most of their output) was a flop.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: As mentioned above, the film was originally written as a straight horror film, as a dark allegory about child abuse, before the studio interfered.
• What Could Have Been: Shelley Long was originally cast as Celeste, but dropped out due to unknown circumstances. Cybill Shepherd was also considered.

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