Today, we are going back 42 years, to look at the movies released into theatres on July 25th, 1980, and how the box office top ten looked that week.
On this date in 80s movie history, three new moderate to wide releases would join one New York City exclusive in opening in theatres:
After the blockbuster success of George Lucas’s Star Wars in the summer of 1977, the race was on for every producer in Hollywood to make the “next” Star Wars. Low-budget film maestro Roger Corman was no different, and he would enlist up-and-coming screenwriter John Sayles, who had already written Pirahna and The Lady in Red for Corman, to come up with a story to meet this goal. What Sayles turned in was more a mash-up of Star Wars and The Magnificent Seven, and Corman would spend $2m (his highest budgeted movie to date) to get it into production in time to release on the heels of The Empire Strikes Back. The movie would also feature one of the earliest scores by James Horner, and some special effects work by James Cameron.
The film, one of two to open this weekend starring Robert Vaughn, would first open on 330 screens in mostly northern and midwestern markets like Chicago, Cleveland, and Portland OR, where it would gross $1.73m, on its way to final box office gross of $11m.
Fans of Caddyshack know just how troubled the production was, making the final film so special.
I was 12 when Caddyshack came out, and I was positively giddy when my dad told me we were going to see it. Along with Saturday Night Live and Animal House, Caddyshack helped to form my comedic likings and anarchic tendencies as a young man, and maybe not always for the best. But it is undeniably a comedic masterpiece with four of the best comedic actors, three of the best comedic writers and one of the best comedic directors of the day coming together to bring us something that could never happen the way it did again. (See Caddyshack II, for one example. Or, better yet, don’t see Caddyshack II. It sucks.)
Caddyshack would open to $3.14m from 656 screens, on its way to a $39.85m final gross.
There is perhaps no filmmaker from the last fifty years who is so revered and reviled by cinephiles and casual movie watchers as Brian De Palma. Loving to court controversy to sell his movies, De Palma would ride another wave of criticism and denunciations to help make his 1980 film Dressed to Kill a hit.
I hope I’m not spoiling a forty-two-year-old movie for you, but the casting of a major star like Angie Dickinson to appear in what is basically an extended cameo, despite her second billing on the poster and in the movie, is the best stunt casting since Janet Leigh in Psycho nearly twenty years earlier. I doubt that Liv Ullman, who was De Palma’s fist choice to play Kate, would have helped the movie the same way Dickinson had. Although it might have been a far more interesting movie had Sean Connery, De Palma’s first choice for Dr. Elliott, had chosen to make the film. Not that Michael Caine wasn’t great in the role, because he was.
Dressed to Kill would open to $3.42m from 591 theatres, on its way to a final gross of $31.9m.
The second Robert Vaughn movie to open this weekend, Hangar 18 is about a cover-up following a UFO incident aboard the Space Shuttle. And while it’s really easy to simply dismiss a cheapie sci-fi conspiracy theory movie released by the notorious schlock distributor Sunn Classics as just another piece of worthless crap, the film would do some good business during its theatrical run. Opening on 20 screens in the Los Angeles area on July 25th, the film would gross $230k that first weekend, on its way to a final gross of more than $11m.
This British movie, a mix of fiction and non-fiction, would tell the story of Roy Gange, a young fan of The Clash who leaves his dead-end job in a sleazy Soho London sex shop to become a roadie for the band. In reality, Gange was a record store employee in Soho and was friends with The Clash lead guitarist Joe Strummer, and it would be at Strummer’s urging that Gange try out for the film despite having no training as, or aspirations of becoming, an actor. And, in fact, Gange would never appear in another movie.
When the movie, which mainly consists of footage of The Clash in concert at the April 1978 Rock Against Racism show in Victoria Park, London, and in the studio recording their 1978 release Give ‘Em Enough Rope, was completed, The Clash would end up disowning the film, objecting to how the film was edited to make black people looks like criminals, and the band would refuse to accept any payments owed to them from the filmmakers. The film would open at the popular independent theatre The 8th Street Playhouse in Lower Manhattan, where it would end up breaking the theatre’s house record by grossing $35k in its first weekend. But in its second week, the weekend box office haul would drop to $9.6k, and after three weeks, the film would leave the 8th Street Playhouse with a gross of just under $50k. There would be a handful of other playdates in America, but the film would disappear from theatres after four weeks and a final gross of just $68,365.
As for the national top ten… well, that’s a hard one. Up until 1982, there wasn’t as much demand for national box office grosses the way some obsess over them now, but based on my research, the top ten highest grossing films in America that week were:
1) Airplane! (Paramount)
2) The Empire Strikes Back (Fox)
$7,130,000 from 1278 theatres
3) Cheech and Chong’s Next Movie (Universal)
$5,262,963 from 814 theatres
4) Caddyshack (Orion)
$3,692,804 from 656 theatres
5) Dressed to Kill (Filmways)
$3,416,000 from 591 theatres
6) The Blues Brothers (Universal)
7) The Blue Lagoon (Columbia)
8) Brubaker (Fox)
9) The Battle Beyond the Stars (New World)
$1,732,000 from 330 theatres
10) Zombie (Jerry Gross Organization)