Trivia / Dunston Checks In

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $16 million. Box office, $9,871,066.
• California Doubling: The movie takes place in New York, though a number of scenes inside the hotel were filmed in hotels located in Los Angeles and London.
• Completely Different Title: In Brazil, the title loosely translates to The Guest Wants Bananas.
  • The French title translates to Funny Monkey.
• Creator Killer: Director Ken Kwapis saw his film career go into the trash after this movie and The Beautician and the Beast imploded at the box office. He turned his focus to television and didn't direct another feature film until 2005. It also put a severe strain on the producers' careers.
• Dueling Works: With Ed, starring Matt LeBlanc opposite a chimpanzee instead of an orangutan and featuring a similar kinship plot. While both films tanked critically and commercially, critics considered Dunston Checks In to be superior by comparison, due to having more touching and enjoyably comedic moments as well as an actual orangutan portraying the title character, things that Ed painfully lacked.
• Genre-Killer: Not too many movies with a monkey outside his natural habitat as the star have been made since this one (if there is a monkey or primate-starring movie, the animal is usually going to be a gorilla).
• Referenced by...: According to Mystery Science Theater 3000 this film is not only better than either Any Which Way You Can or Any Which Way But Loose, it is the best ape movie ever.
• Screwed by the Network: 20th Century Fox had such little faith in the film, they held the Hollywood premiere on a Sunday morning! It ended up getting a January release without much promotion.
• Star-Derailing Role:
  • This was another failed attempt for Jason Alexander to jump from the small screen and Seinfeld to the big screen, coming a few years after Roger Ebert hated North, which had an infamous "Loosen His Pants!" line.
  • Not many of the other actors besides Glenn Shadix, Rupert Everett, and Faye Dunaway went anywhere with their careers after this either (for Paul Reubens, there were also legal reasons, and Rupert Everett would be handed a few more Star-Derailing Roles such as Disney's version of DiC's Inspector Gadget (1999) later).
• Vindicated by Video: Despite bombing at the box office, the movie did massive sales when it was released on video, making $40 million in sales back in less than a year.

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