Production notes

Danny Strong's screenplay is inspired by Wil Haygood's Washington Post article "A Butler Well Served by This Election". The project received initial backing in early 2011 when producers Laura Ziskin and Pam Williams approached Sheila Johnson for help financing the film. After reading Danny Strong's screenplay, Johnson invested $2.7 million before bringing in several African American investors. However, Ziskin died from cancer in June 2011. This left director Daniels and producing partner Hilary Shor to look further for producers. They started with Cassian Elwes, with whom they were working on The Paperboy. Elwes joined the list of producers and began fundraising for the film. In spring 2012, AI Film, a British financing and production company, added a $6 million guarantee against foreign pre-sales. Finally, the film raised its requisite $30 million budget through 41 producers and executive producers, including Earl W. Stafford, Harry I. Martin Jr., Brett Johnson, Michael Finley and Buddy Patrick. Thereafter, as film production started, Weinstein Co. picked up U.S. distribution rights for the film. David Glasser, Weinstein Co. COO, called fundraising as an independent film "a story that's a movie within itself". The Weinstein Company acquired the distribution rights for the film after Columbia Pictures put the film in turnaround. The film's title was up for a possible renaming due to a Motion Picture Association claim from Warner Bros., which had inherited from the defunct Lubin Company a now-lost 1916 silent short film with the same name. The case was subsequently resolved with the MPAA granting The Weinstein Company permission to add Lee Daniels in front of the title, under the condition that his name was "75% the size of The Butler". On July 23, 2013, the distributor unveiled a revised poster, displaying the title as Lee Daniels' The Butler.

Principal photography started in June 2012 in New Orleans. Interior White House scenes were shot at Second Line Stages. Production was originally scheduled to wrap in early August 2012 but was delayed by the impact of Hurricane Isaac.

In its opening weekend, the film debuted in first place, with $24.6 million. The film topped the North American box office in its first three consecutive weeks. The film has grossed $116.6 million in Canada and the United States, and it earned $60.7 million elsewhere, for a total of $177.3 million.

The Butler received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, it has a 72% rating, based on 199 reviews, with an average score of 6.60/10. The site's consensus says: "Gut-wrenching and emotionally affecting, Lee Daniels' The Butler overcomes an uneven narrative thanks to strong performances from an all-star cast." On Metacritic, it has a weighted average score of 65 based on 47 reviews, indicating "generally positive" reviews. Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an "A" on a scale of A+ to F. Todd McCarthy of The Hollywood Reporter praised the film, saying, "Even with all contrivances and obvious point-making and familiar historical signposting, Daniels' The Butler is always engaging, often entertaining and certainly never dull." Richard Roeper lauded the film's casting, remarking that "Forest Whitaker gives the performance of his career". Rolling Stone also spoke highly of Whitaker, writing that his "reflective, powerfully understated performance...fills this flawed film with potency and purpose". Variety wrote that "Daniels develops a strong sense of the inner complexities and contradictions of the civil-rights landscape". USA Today gave the film three stars out of four, and noted, "It's inspiring and filled with fine performances, but the insistently swelling musical score and melodramatic moments seem calculated and undercut a powerful story". Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times was more negative: "An ambitious and overdue attempt to create a Hollywood-style epic around the experience of black Americans in general and the civil rights movement in particular, it undercuts itself by hitting its points squarely on the nose with a 9-pound hammer." Several critics compared the film's historical anecdotes and sentimentality to Forrest Gump. President Barack Obama said, "I teared up thinking about not just the butlers who worked here in the White House, but an entire generation of people who were talented and skilled. But because of Jim Crow and because of discrimination, there was only so far they could go."

Regarding historical accuracy, Eliana Dockterman wrote in Time: "Allen was born on a Virginia plantation in 1919, not in Georgia.... In the movie, Cecil' Gaines grows up on a cotton field in Macon, where his family comes into conflict with the white farmers for whom they work. What befalls his parents on the cotton field was added for dramatic effect.... Though tension between father and son over civil rights issues fuels most of the drama in the film, [Eugene Allen's son] Charles Allen was not the radical political activist that Gaines's son is in the movie." The film also excluded Billy Graham from Eisenhower's meeting regarding the sending of troops to Arkansas to aid the Little Rock Nine. By 1992, Christian Century acknowledged that Graham in fact had a vital role in persuading Eisenhower's to go along with this decision. The film also falsely portrayed Lyndon Johnson as initially being reluctant to support the Selma Movement. A phone conversation between Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. on January 15, 1965, showed that King privately conspired with Johnson and that Johnson sought to use the Movement to advance the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and other legislation through Congress. Particular criticism has been directed at the film's accuracy in portraying President Ronald Reagan. While Alan Rickman's performance generated positive reviews, conservative activists criticized the director and screenwriters of the film for depicting Reagan as indifferent to civil rights and reluctant to associate with the White House's Black employees during his presidency. According to Michael Reagan, the former president's son and a conservative activist, "The real story of the White House butler doesn't imply racism at all. It's simply Hollywood liberals wanting to believe something about my father that was never there." Paul Kengor, one of President Reagan's biographers, also attacked the film, saying, "I've talked to many White House staff, cooks, housekeepers, doctors, and Secret Service over the years. They are universal in their love of Ronald Reagan." Regarding the president's initial opposition to sanctions against apartheid in South Africa, Kengor said, "Ronald Reagan was appalled by apartheid, but also wanted to ensure that if the apartheid regime collapsed in South Africa that it wasn't replaced by a Marxist-totalitarian regime allied with Moscow and Cuba that would take the South African people down the same road as Ethiopia, Mozambique, and, yes, Cuba. In the immediate years before Reagan became president, 11 countries from the Third World, from Asia to Africa to Latin America, went Communist. It was devastating. If the film refuses to deal with this issue with the necessary balance, it shouldn't deal with it at all."