The Devil and Max Devlin is a 1981 American fantasy–comedy film produced by Walt Disney Productions, directed by Steven Hilliard Stern and starring Elliott Gould, Bill Cosby and Susan Anspach.

While running to escape his angry tenants after one of them blurts out that he owns the building, Max is killed by a bus and descends into hell, which resembles a corporate headquarters.

Max's three targets are Stella Summers, a high school dropout and aspiring singer; Nerve Nordlinger, a student who dreams of being popular; and Toby Hart, a child who longs for his widowed mother Penny to find happiness again.

Max charms his way into each of their lives by landing a recording contract for Stella, training Nerve as a motorbike racer after school, and spending time with Toby while helping Penny operate a day care facility.

The film was shot on Soundstage 3 at Disney's Burbank studio where the underworld set used so many butane furnaces, dry ice, and smoke machines pushing the heat up to 100 degrees, the cast and crew could only stay inside for a limited time while shooting.

[7] To date, neither the two singles nor the film's underscore have received any kind of release on CD, but Julie Budd rerecorded the latter song for a 2005 album called The New Classics.

"[11] Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "Somewhere inside 'The Devil and Max Devlin' (citywide), a lively, well-thought-out script (by Mary Rogers) struggles against layers of Disneyfication ... Cosby, in an unsympathetic first for him, has nothing which stretches either his comedic or his acting gifts.

"[12] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote, "It's no fun at all watching a lumpy, glum Elliott Gould going through the motions of preying on a group of children before reforming himself with the foregone conclusion of a last-minute change of heart.

It was also not a sizable moneymaker for the studio; it came in 45th place in the yearly U.S. box office race with a $16 million gross,[15] but an August 1981 article in the New York Times quoted Ron W. Miller as saying that it lost money.

In fact, he allowed characters to use the word "hell" in the feature films 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Sleeping Beauty, and 101 Dalmatians and depicted it as a place in the short cartoon Pluto's Judgement Day.

In the U.K., its 1981 videocassette debut caused a minor stir as it coincided with the growing uproar over "Video nasties," the press-generated term for films with gory violence and explicit sex.