Golan and Globus were on their way to the Cannes Film Festival in a couple of weeks, and hoped they could start selling their next Charles Bronson movie there. Kohner pitched them a script—for what would eventually become another Bronson classic, The Evil that Men Do (1984)—with a price tag to option it at $200,000. Cannon balked. Who needed to pay $200,000 for a screenplay? Was a screenplay even necessary at all to sell a film? In Cannon’s case, the answer was no.
Cannon agreed to make a Charles Bronson feature, but not The Evil that Men Do. They’d figure out exactly what film that would be at a future date, but in the meantime they needed to come up with a placeholder name they could use to pre-sell the movie to foreign territories at Cannes. Golan gave the then-imaginary movie its title, 10 to Midnight, for no other reason than he thought it sounded cool. Under that title they mocked up a crude drawing of Bronson firing an Uzi in front of a globe, called it an “international thriller,” and loosely described a plot that involved an “ultimate vigilante” getting even with terrorists. This as-yet-nonexistent movie sold like hot cakes.
Back in the States with a budget in hand, it was finally time for the producers to find a script for their project. Kohner reached out to Lance Hool, a fellow producer with whom he and Bronson had worked on a movie called Cabo Blanco (1980) […] Hool had been developing a script under the working title Blood Bath, which Kohner knew was a potential fit for Bronson […]
The Blood Bath script was not an international thriller and had nothing to do with terrorism, both of which were things the original sales art had advertised. Even the title itself, 10 to Midnight, was meaningless once pasted overtop the Blood Bath script. None of that mattered now that their money was already in hand.
— From Austin Trunick’s eyewateringly exhaustive The Cannon Film Guide: Volume I, 1980–1984.
To be fair, if someone approached me with this poster, I’d be tempted to invest:
