Production notes

The film was originally intended for the recently married Madonna and Sean Penn, but both backed out after the project failed to attract a director. The project moved from HandMade Films to Blake Edwards, who agreed to direct contingent on script changes. The studio agreed and the movie was re-cast with Bruce Willis and Kim Basinger. Filming took place between May 5 and July 14, 1986 in Los Angeles, Santa Monica and Culver City. Billy Vera & The Beaters appear in the bar scene, playing several songs.

Blind Date was released in the United States and Canada on March 27, 1987. During its opening weekend it grossed a total of $7.5 million from 1,251 theaters—an average of $6,020 per theater—making it the highest grossing film of the weekend, ahead of Lethal Weapon ($5 million), in its 4th weekend of release, and Platoon ($3.9 million), in its fifteenth. In its second weekend, Blind Date fell to the number 2 position with a $5.7 million gross, placing it behind the debuting Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol ($8.5 million) and ahead of Platoon ($4.7 million). It fell to the number 3 position in its third weekend with a $4.1 million gross, behind Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol ($4.5 million) and the debuting The Secret of My Success ($7.8 million). Blind Date left the top-ten highest-grossing films after ten weeks. In total, Blind Date grossed $39.3 million, making it the 23rd-highest-grossing film of 1987 in the US and Canada.

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 27%, based on 26 reviews. The website's consensus reads, "Blind Date has all the ingredients for a successful madcap comedy, but the end results suggest director Blake Edwards has lost his once-reliable touch." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 49 out of 100, based on 14 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four and wrote: "There are individual moments in this movie that are as funny as anything Edwards has ever done, but they're mostly sight gags and don't grow out of the characters. The characters, alas, are the problem." Ebert thought that Willis played his nebbishy character too successfully (to the point of being dull), and Basinger's haircut obscured her eyes and face. "Most of the time I wasn't laughing. But when I was laughing, I was genuinely laughing - there are some absolutely inspired moments." Variety calls it "essentially a running string of gags with snippets of catchy dialog in-between".