The US summer box office season of 2020 has taken some decidedly odd turns, with a global pandemic pushing films off the traditional summer schedule, into digital platforms or off the calendar entirely.
So, in their absence, I thought I’d take a look back at what punters were doing when the outside world wasn’t just on our screens.
The first stop on my wayback machine is 1980, a year that opened with Sidney Lumet’s Just Tell Me What You Want and closed with Buck Henry’s First Family. While future stars Olivia Munn, Eva Green, Kristen Bell, Macaulay Culkin and Chris Pine were busy being born, the likes of Airplane! (or Flying High!) and something called The Empire Strikes Back were shutting up and taking our money.
May
The summer season began with the unexpected success of FRIDAY THE 13TH (Dir: Sean S. Cunningham) on May 9, a $550,000 slasher film that took a whopping US$59.8 million.
Now a staple of the horror franchise, the little indie-that-could – one that got a rare international release – stole shamelessly from other slashers, carved out its own niche and gave the world of a glimpse of all six degrees of Kevin Bacon in his Speedo. Its only rival on release was the Get Smart spin-off NUDE BOMB (Dir: Clive Donner), a film that lived up to its name with critics and audiences.
Alan Parker’s FAME followed fast on May 16, teaching us how to fly and changing the way we thought about inner city teens learning music forever. My favourite detail is the one kid who went to the High School of Performing Arts for three years and plays the cymbals once in the final concert. He will live forever, because he already made it to heaven.
Yet no film would dominate the American summer more than THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (Dir: Irvin Kerschner). It’s hard to imagine it now – with two new trilogies, spin-offs and so many TV shows later – but this was the first Star Wars sequel. Pre-Internet buzz, it was an atomic smash to the box office that year: people lined up around the block to the tune of $181.4 million on initial release, a figure that went even higher when it was re-released the following year. It crushed the closest competitor – the Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, and Dolly Parton vehicle 9 to 5 – by almost $100 million in 1980 money. In 2020 money, that would be…probably more?
May was bookended by another horror film, the now iconic THE SHINING (Dir: Stanley Kubrick). It wasn’t always revered, of course, with author Stephen King famously furious about the treatment of his novel. Since then it’s been endlessly parodied, reworked in both Ready Player One and the official sequel Doctor Sleep, and (as my friend Alex once put it) somehow remade scene-for-scene in 8-minute The Simpsons‘ ‘Treehouse of Horror’ episode.
Other notable releases included Walter Hill’s western revival The Long Riders and The Gong Show Movie, which caused George Burns to react: “For the first time in 65 years, I wanted to get out of show business.” You can’t buy that kind of press.
June
As 1980 moved into summer proper, the inauspicious start of June quickly segued out of The Happy Hooker Goes to Hollywood and Galaxina (starring 1980 Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratten) into James Bridges’ URBAN COWBOY starring John Travolta. This was even before his career needed reviving: it was already (wait for it) staying alive by itself.
The middle of June was decidedly weird. First of all, there’s The Children (a.k.a. The Children of Ravensback), a low-budget horror flick from Max Kalmanowicz that (according to the Wiki) is about a “yellow toxic cloud” that “transformed [a group of five children] into bloodless zombies with black fingernails who microwave every living thing they put their hands on.” My favourite review comes from The Los Angeles Times who said it “reeks of a nasty, ill-defined dislike of humankind.” The problem being? Of course, its main competition was The Island, a slasher with Michael Caine and David Warner, and musical comedy Roadie starring no less a talent than Meatloaf. What could possibly go wrong?
Speaking of musicals, can you imagine John Landis’ THE BLUES BROTHERS coming out now? After all, it’s been decades since there was a truly successful leap from Saturday Night Light concept to cinema. The premise of a soul/blues musical road trip across Illinois wouldn’t even get past the pitch stage in 2020, but a $115 million box office taking and the biggest car pile-up to date ensured its cult status forever. (Total sidebar: what other film could get me excited for a trip to the Cook County Assessor’s Office during my first visit to Chicago?)
It opened across from another musical, CAN’T STOP THE MUSIC (Dir: Nancy Walker). The bizarre fictionalised origin story of the Village People stars the band as themselves, opposite megastars Steve Guttenberg and Bruce Jenner! Its legacy is winning two of the first ever Razzie Awards for Worst Picture and Worst Screenplay, as well as being the first film Australians watch every year: it comes on immediately after the telecast of the New Year’s Eve fireworks on Channel 9. It’s a magic night.
The month ended with the now familiar sight of Disney domination as Herbie Goes Bananas went up against The Last Flight of Noah’s Ark. Herbie would live to ride again.
July
Have you ever seen a grown man naked? Jim Abrahams, David Zucker, and Jerry Zucker’s AIRPLANE! (or as it’s known here, FLYING HIGH!) is a comedy classic that somehow gets funnier every time you see it. As inappropriate today as it was in the early 80s, this parody of the Airport films was a box office titan that came in at #4 overall in 1980. Seems like it was a good time to give up sniffing glue.
It wouldn’t be summer without a monster movie, and Lewis Teague’s ALLIGATOR terrified us all of going to the bathroom. Then, long before #isolife, THE BLUE LAGOON (Dir: Randal Kleiser) was the ultimate isolation coming-of-age fantasy, except this one had Brooke Shields instead of your disapproving cat staring back at you.
An odd string of films – from casting Chevy Chase as Benji in Oh! Heavenly Dog to Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie – led their way up to summer’s other slasher film: PROM NIGHT. Jamie Lee Curtis solidified her reputation of a scream queen as another final girl in one of several films riding high on the whiff of slasher success.
In the final week of July, the tail-end of the traditional box office peak, the American-Australian drama film THE EARTHLING (Dir: Peter Collinson) dropped, a film that was partially shot in Sydney’s Blue Mountains region. It was dwarfed by Harold Ramis’ legendary comedy CADDYSHACK – starring the amazingly talented comedians Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, and Bill Murray – and Brian De Palma’s DRESSED TO KILL, a film that earned Nancy Allen both Golden Globe and Golden Raspberry nominations.
Beyond summer
Of course, a film calendar isn’t defined by its blockbuster summer. The rest of the year gave us bona fide classics with the likes of Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull, David Lynch’s Elephant Man and Robert Redford’s directoral debut, Ordinary People. Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha and Bob Fosse’s autobiographical All that Jazz split the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Less successful was Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate, a massive western flop that is said to have brought the wave of New Hollywood films conclusively to an end.
At the other end of the scale, there was Xanadu, Flash Gordon and Robert Altman’s misguided Popeye. There’s was whatever Menahem Golan was trying to do with his sci-fi musical The Apple. Scholars are still puzzling that one. The year would start to come to a close with Any Which Way You Can, a sequel that continued to see Clint Eastwood out-starred by an orangutan. Decades later, he would recreate the experience with an empty chair.
40 years later
The legacy of the summer of 1980 continues 40 years on. Copycat slasher horror films still populate our screens, and Star Wars sequels maintain their multi-billion dollar Disney dominance. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that). What is arguably missing from the box office today are those films with an anarchic sense of fun, the kind of thing Canon Films were known for in their heyday. Yet as we’ll see when the wayback machine drops in 1990, the Franchise Movie would play a bigger role in summer over the next 10 years.
Next stop: the Summer of 1990 which included Back to the Future Part III, Gremlins 2: The New Batch, Another 48 Hours, Robocop 2, Die Hard 2, Young Guns II – and even some non-sequels too!
