Production notes

The idea for the film came shortly after the birth of Amy Heckerling's daughter Mollie Israel in 1985. Heckerling recalled: "We'd be making up lines and I thought, this is a movie". Harold Ramis believed the character of Albert (George Segal) to be based on himself, as he was secretly the biological father of Heckerling's child. Like Albert, Ramis was in the process of leaving his wife Anne Plotkin during Heckerling's pregnancy but ultimately ended up with a third woman, Erica Mann.

The film received mixed reviews. On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 56% of 39 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 5.5/10. The website's consensus reads: "Look Who's Talking holds some appeal thanks to its affable stars and Amy Heckerling's energetic direction, but a silly script doesn't allow wit to get a word in edgewise." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 51 out of 100, based on 15 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Look Who's Talking was a surprise hit, opening at number one in the United States with $12,107,784 in its opening weekend and staying at number one for five weekends with grosses over $10 million each weekend. It eventually grossed $140,088,813 domestically and a worldwide total of $296,999,813, making it John Travolta's most successful film in eleven years since Grease, the fourth highest-grossing film of 1989, and Columbia TriStar's highest-grossing film overseas, surpassing Kramer vs. Kramer. The film was released in the United Kingdom on April 6, 1990, and topped the country's box office that weekend.