The movie had a considerably higher budget than the prior two Evil Dead films. The budget was estimated to be around $11 million; Evil Dead II had a budget of $3.5 million and The Evil Dead a budget of $350,000. At the box office, Army of Darkness was not a big success, barely making back its budget with a gross of $11.5 million domestically. After its video release, however, it has obtained an ever-growing cult following, along with the other two films in the trilogy.

Production

Plans to make a third Evil Dead film had been circulating for a number of years, even prior to the production of Darkman^. Evil Dead II made enough money internationally that Dino De Laurentiis was willing to finance a sequel. Director and script writer Sam Raimi drew from a variety of sources, including literature with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, Jason and the Argonauts, and The Three Stooges. Evil Dead II, according to Bruce Campbell, “was originally designed to go back into the past to 1300, but we couldn’t muster it at the time, so we decided to make an interim version, not knowing if the 1300 story would ever get made”. Promotional drawings were created and published in Variety during the casting process before the budget was deemed too little for the plot. The working title for the project was Evil Dead III: Army of Darkness. The title “Army of Darkness” came from an idea by Irvin Shapiro, during the production of Evil Dead II. This was used after Sam Raimi was unable to use his original title “The Medieval Dead.”