Today, we are going back 38 years, to look at the movies released into theatres on July 27th, 1984, and how the box office top ten looked that week.
On this date in 80s movie history, four new moderate to wide releases would join one New York City exclusive in opening in theatres.
After four movies filled with their trademark stoner humor, Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong were ready for a change.
First, they co-starred in the 1983 comedy Yellowbeard, co-written by Graham Chapman of Monty Python’s Flying Circus and Peter Cook, the one-time comedy partner of Dudley Moore’s who was named in a 2005 poll of 300 comedians, comedy writers, producers, and directors on both sides of the Atlantic the world’s most talented comedian. Cheech and Chong would be on screen with a number of the most talented comedic actors working at the time, including Chapman, Cook, Peter Boyle, John Cleese, Marty Feldman, Eric Idle, Madeline Kahn, Kenneth Mars, and Spike Milligan, but somehow, even with a cast like that, the movie was horrible, and in good part to the miscasting of Cheech and Chong as a lisping Spanish despot (Chong) and his majordomo (Cheech).
But as God awful as Yellowbeard is (Cleese would call it one of the six worst movies ever made, while Idle would say it was the worst movie he’s ever been involved in), it’s a damn masterpiece in comparison to The Corsican Brothers. An adaptation of the 1844 novel by Alexandre Dumas père, finds the comedy pair as superfecund twins in nineteenth-century France who reunite after many years apart to depose a usurper to the French throne. Instead of using the comedy skills that made them beloved for more than a decade, they would play their characters as the worst caricatures possible, and use offensive and/or anachronistic moments to sell the comedy. It just didn’t work, and the film’s failure would become a major bone of contention between the pair that would see them split up the following year.
Opening in 868 theatres, Cheech and Chong’s The Corsican Brothers would open in 14th place with just $1.67m in ticket sales. Orion Pictures would stop reporting grosses ($3.77m total) after two weeks.
The most obscure of all the movies that opened this weekend, this New Zealand drama stars Mary Regan as a woman who works on her father’s sheep farm, trapped in an incestual relationship with her dad, and the drifter who comes to the farm who starts to develop feelings for her and tries to help her escape.
While New World Pictures was mainly known in the 80s for B-level movies like Humanoids from the Deep, Battle Beyond the Stars and The Slumber Party Masscare, Roger Corman’s indie distributor had quite the history of bringing foreign movies to the States and helping them to become minor hits and/or award winners. Movies like François Truffaut’s Love on the Run (the fifth and final film in his Antoine Doniel series), Volker Schlöndorff’s The Tin Drum (the 1980 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film) and Bruce Beresford’s Breaker Morant were just three of the dozens of non-American movies that Corman would bring to America.
But for whatever reason, despite some stellar reviews for the actors and director Michael Firth, Heart of the Stag would not travel far outside of New York’s Embassy 72nd Street Twin and the Quad Cinemas. The film would only gross $13,400 in its first weekend at the two theatres, and be gone after two weeks and less than $20k in ticket sales.
It might be hard to understand in a day and age when you watch darn near every movie the Walt Disney Company ever made whenever you feel like it, but it was less than two generations ago when, if you wanted to see a Disney classic like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves or The Jungle Book, you’d usually have to wait five to seven years, or sometimes more than ten years, for Disney to re-release it into theatres.
Originally released in 1967, this release of The Jungle Book would be only the third time it was released into theatres, after a very successful re-release in 1978 helped to propel the film ahead of Snow White as the most successful animated film to be released to that point. (Snow White would reclaim that title when it was re-released earlier in 1983).
The Jungle Book would open to $5.29m from 1430 theatres in its first weekend, on its way to a final gross (this release) of $23m. The film would be re-released into theatres one final time in 1990 before it was released on home video in 1991.
This is not a real sequel to Meatballs. If you look at the credits on the poster above, you might notice it does list any of the actors, writers, producers or director of Meatballs. No Bill Murray. No Ivan Reitman. No Harold Ramis. Basically, director Ken Wiederhorn had made a summer camp movie titled Summertime in late 1983. In the spring of 1984, once filming was complete, producer Tony Bishop started to take the film around town to try and secure a distribution deal.
Around the same time in late 1983, original Meatballs producer John Dunning, who had no interest in making a Meatballs sequel, sold the title rights to a production company in Hollywood, who would end up making a deal at the newly formed Tri-Star Pictures to make a Meatballs movie. A screenwriter was hired, and there were plans to produce a new movie. When Bishop showed up with Summertime, one of the executives at Tri-Star suggested they save the cost of producing a new movie by buying this film, slap the Meatballs Part II title on it, and release it as is to an unsuspecting audience.
And that’s exactly what happened.
Now, remember, in the summer of 1984, Murray and Reitman and Ramis were riding high thanks to the success of Ghostbusters, and they would actually try to talk Columbia Picutres, the distributor of Ghostbusters and 1/3 parent company to Tri-Star Pictures (along with the CBS television network, and HBO), to try and get them to cancel the release of the movie, to no avail. Murray, in particular, had to be careful about how far he could push, because Columbia was gearing up to release his passion project, an adaptation of the 1944 W. Somerset Maugham novel The Razor’s Edge that Murray hoped would propel him into the next level of respectability, the way The World According to Garp and Moscow on the Hudson has helped Robin Williams be percieved as more than just Mork from Ork.
Meatballs Part II would indeed trick a small portion of the moviegoing audience, grossing $2.5m from 1252 theatres in its first weekend. The reviews for the film were deservedly brutal, and the film would have the rare ignobility of losing nearly 20% of its theatres in its second week of release. After that second week in release, Tri-Star would stop reporting grosses. The final reported gross was $5.4m.
Fun fact: after the failure of Meatballs Part II, John Dunning would quickly re-acquire the rights to the Meatballs title, and would produce Meatballs III: Summer Job in late summer 1984. Yes, mere weeks after Meatballs Part II had failed at the box office. This Meatballs was an actual sorta-sequel to Meatballs, with Patrick Dempsey, in his first starring role, playing the Rudy role that Chris Makepeace played in the original film. There are also a number of pictures of Bill Murray as Trip in various locations around the marina where Rudy works. But that film wouldn’t get released until February 1987, and it would be an even bigger bomb than Meatballs Part II, grossing only $2.1m during its brief theatrical run. There would also be a Meatballs 4 made in 1991 and released into theatres in March 1992, but despite starring Corey Feldman, it too would follow the other Meatballs movies by grossing even less than its predesecor.
Movie nerds will completely understand what I am talking about when I say there are movies that change who you are, how you see the world, how you think, how you feel, and help form the person you will become. For me, Purple Rain was one of those movies.
I was still only 16 when Purple Rain came out, and I have to admit, I wasn’t particularly as desperate to see it as many of my friends were. Sure, I thought 1999 and Little Red Corvette and Delirious were good songs, but I didn’t rush out and buy 1999 on album. Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t afford a double album at the time. Double albums were like $10.99 at the time. That’s rich kid money. My friends Dick and Beach wanted to see the movie, and Dick was 17 and old enough to get us tickets, so we went.
Not opening night but the night after. 41st Avenue Playhouse. 7:15pm show. #2 house, one of only three theatres in all of Santa Cruz county that had Dolby Stereo. The place was packed with mostly teenagers like us. The lights go down. The curtain goes up. There’s a bunch of trailers, I don’t remember which ones. Then the United Artists Theatres policy trailer. Yeah yeah yeah. Don’t smoke in the theatre. Take your trash with you at the end of the movie. And then the movie begins. Prince in silhouette. The opening keyboards from Let’s Go Crazy start to play. The title of the movie appears on screen. The drums kick in. And then Prince sings “Go crazy, punch a higher floor. Woah.”
And there’s dancing in the aisles.
Dancing in the rows.
The theatre has gone crazy.
And it was one of the most magical moments I’ve ever experienced in a theatre.
Was Prince a great actor? No, but it’s not that hard to play yourself. Was Albert Magnoli a great director? No, but the movie had some damn good editors. What made the movie was the music. The right musician with the right songs in the right vehicle at the right time. And in four-track Dolby Stereo? Fuggetaboutit!
As soon as the show was over, me and Dick and Beach went to Cymbaline Records, the hippest record store in Santa Cruz, with a store not 300 feet from the movie theatre, and we each bought a copy of the soundtrack. I can’t speak for them, but I must have listened to that album 200 times before we went back to school six weeks later. I never became a full-on Prince fan, although I loved many of the singles he would release in the remainder of the decade, I could never get into Prince’s whole catalog the way so many others had. But that movie and that soundtrack, and the contributions from Morris Day and The Time, made the second half of the summer of 1984 a lot more tolerable than the first half.
When I returned to school that fall, I was less timid than before. I wasn’t afraid to ask a girl out for a date the way I had been before, worried as I had been about being rejected because I didn’t look like Rob Lowe or Johnny Depp, the pretty boy movie stars that were just coming into being. I wasn’t afraid to get to know other students outside my bubble of drama kids. And most of that confidence came from seeing Purple Rain, and listening to that soundtrack. If this guy, who was only like 25, could have that much talent and that much intelligence and that much confidence in himself, why not me?
So thanks for that, Prince.
As for the national top ten that weekend:
1) Purple Rain (Warners)
$7,766,201 from 917 theatres.
$7.77m after three days.
2) Ghostbusters (Columbia)
$7,687,282 from 1460 theatres.
$142.69m after eight weeks.
3) The Jungle Book [re-release] (Disney)
$5,291,670 from 1430 theatres.
$5.29m after three days.
4) Gremlins (Warners)
$4,596,286 from 1411 theatres.
$113.27m after eight weeks.
5) The Karate Kid (Columbia)
$3,891,130 from 1069 theatres.
$42.36m after six weeks.
6) The Neverending Story (Warners)
$3,300,966 from 950 theatres.
$9.99m after two weeks.
7) Best Defense (Paramount)
$3,175,612 from 1425 theatres.
$14.16m after two weeks.
8) Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (Paramount)
$2,591,995 from 1052 theatres.
$151.47m after ten weeks.
9) Meatballs Part II (Tri-Star)
$2,515,268 from 1252 theatres.
$2.52m after three days.
10) The Muppets Take Manhattan (Tri-Star)
$2,291,250 from 975 theatres.
$16.98m after three weeks.