5 Things You Didn’t Know About ‘Flatliners,’ Julia Roberts’ 1990 Horror Film

Julia Roberts has worn many different hats in Hollywood, from America’s sweetheart to respected Oscar winner — but “scream queen” isn’t generally considered one of them. However, mere months after her star-making turn in Pretty Woman, Roberts released Flatliners, which hit theaters on August 10, 1990. It was her first horror film — and, as it turns out, her second-to-last, as well; after the 1996 Victorian horror bomb Mary Reilly, the actress never went near a scary movie ever again.
Roberts practically dashed from the set of Pretty Woman, which wrapped filming in October 1989, to Flatliners, which began filming in October 1989 — but while the former film transformed her into a household name and is still considered a classic 35 years later, Flatliners has not been quite so lucky.
That’s not a knock against the movie. The film, which follows five medical students who decide to play God by inducing near-death experiences in each other (with predictably ooky-spooky results) boasts a stacked cast — in addition to Roberts, it includes Kiefer Sutherland, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt and William Baldwin. Director Joel Schumacher was just off his previous collaboration with Sutherland, The Lost Boys, and would soon move on to his blockbuster John Grisham adaptations and Batman films. And cinematography is handled by future Twister director Jan de Bont. Though it isn’t in the Hollywood canon the way some of Roberts’ films are, it has developed a cult following — one strong enough to lead to a 2017 reboot.
Read on for five intriguing (but hopefully not heart-stopping) facts about Flatliners.
1The producers hated … Boston?
The original screenplay for Flatliners was set in Boston, which makes sense — the characters are medical students, and Boston is a city jam-packed with colleges. But producer Michael Rachmil declared to the Chicago Tribune in a July 1989 article that though he and director Joel Schumacher visited Boston, “I won’t make this movie there. I hated the place.” What was the problem? Not a fan of the Red Sox? It couldn’t have been about the area’s frosty winter weather, because in the end, the film was set in … Chicago.
2It was part of a Chicago filmmaking renaissance
Boston’s loss was Chicago’s gain — Flatliners was the first film to take advantage of then-mayor Richard Daley’s campaign to make Chicago a filmmaking hot spot. A 2010 Chicago Tribune article noted that “more than 900 movies and television shows have shot in Chicago since Mayor Richard Daley took office in 1989, starting with “Flatliners.” The movie is filled with notable Chicago-area locations; the building in which the crew conduct their death-defying experiments is the city’s famous the Museum of Science and Industry, while college exteriors were shot at Loyola University.
3Julia Roberts & Kiefer Sutherland began dating on set

Everett Collection
A good test of how old you are is how well you remember Julia Roberts’ turbulent, tabloid-friendly ’90s love life. Though Roberts and second husband Danny Moder have been married for well over 20 years now, there was a time when her name was linked to leading man after leading man — all of whom she seemed to quickly get engaged to, and then just as quickly break up with.
After a previous engagement to previous co-star Dylan McDermott went belly up, Roberts and Sutherland hooked up on the set of Flatliners and also quickly became engaged. However, just a year later, in 1991, they called off their wedding in dramatic and public fashion; Sutherland claimed it was Roberts’ idea, and rumor held that she had run off to Ireland with Sutherland’s Lost Boys costar, Jason Patric, the day of their planned wedding.
For her part, Roberts told Entertainment Weekly, in a November 1991 interview, that “I had returned from a trip to Arizona intending to tell Kiefer that I thought it would be best for both of us not to get married. But the next time I talked to Kiefer … he proceeded to tell me what I was going to tell him, which is he did not want to marry me.” She and Patric split in 1992; in 1993, she married country star Lyle Lovett, whom she divorced in 1995.
4Michael Douglas produced it
When we were shouting out the big names involved in this film at the top, we skipped over one of the biggest — Michael Douglas, who served as executive producer. Though obviously best known as an actor, Douglas has periodically produced films he isn’t acting in; the most notable among them would probably be 1997’s Face/ Off.
At some point in the 2000s, Douglas attempted to revive Flatliners as a TV show; when that didn’t pan out, he pivoted to producing the 2017 remake … or was it something more??
5Sutherland appeared in the reboot (or was it a sequel?)

Michael Gibson. ©Columbia/courtesy Everett Collection
Though Julia was never a scream queen, Kiefer went through a period where he was a bit of a scream king — in addition to Flatliners, he turned up in 1987’s The Lost Boys, 1992’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, and the grim 1993 thriller The Vanishing (alongside a pre-fame Sandra Bullock). More recently, he’s become synonymous with government thrillers — but he tossed his horror hat back on for the 2017 remake of Flatliners, making him the only original cast member to return.
However, Sutherland’s presence begs the question as to whether the film is a reboot, or a sequel. In the new film, his character is a professor named Dr. Barry Wolfson, who teaches the new generation of flatlining doctors, and appears to have no connection to Nelson Wright, his character from the original film.
However, when the new film was announced in 2016, Sutherland told Metro UK that “I play a professor at the medical university. It is never stated but it will probably be very clearly understood that I’m the same character I was in the original Flatliners but that I have changed my name and I’ve done some things to move on from the experiments that we were doing in the original film.”
The final version of the 2017 film didn’t have any scenes or info that would connect Sutherland’s new character to his old character. However, according to the director of the new film, a scene had been shot that teased a connection between the two films, and Sutherland’s presence in both. However, it was cut by the studio out of fear that it would bore young audiences — perhaps even bore them to death.

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