National Lampoon’s Animal House is a 1978 comedy film directed by John Landis and adapted by Douglas Kenney, Christopher Miller and Harold Ramis from stories written by Miller and published in National Lampoon magazine based on his experiences in the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity at Dartmouth College. It is about a misfit group of fraternity boys who take on the system at their college.
The film is considered to be the movie that launched the gross-out genre. It was produced on a small budget of $2.7 million and has turned out to be one of the most profitable films of all time. Since its initial release, Animal House has garnered an estimated return of more than $141 million in the form of video and DVDs not including merchandising.
The initial cast was to feature Chevy Chase, Bill Murray, Brian Doyle-Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and John Belushi but only Belushi wanted to do it. He received only $35,000 for the film with a bonus after it became a hit. In 2001, the United States Library of Congress deemed Animal House “culturally significant” and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.
