Today, we are going back 34 years, to look at the movies released into theatres on July 24th, 1987, and how the box office top ten looked that week.
On this date in 80s movie history, one new wide release would join two movies that had been released two days earlier (Wednesday, July 22nd), as well as one New York City exclusive:
It’s funny, the things that you latch onto about movies. La Bamba was an exceptional movie, one of the better bio-pics of the decade, and would bring the music of Ritchie Valens to a generation of new fans. But what I will always remember most fondly about the film has nothing to do with the film itself, but how it was the movie I would show to the members of Oingo Boingo when their 1987 Boi-ngo stopped in Santa Cruz. How Boingo drummer Johnny “Vatos” Hernandez would borrow a friend’s scooter and just ride it up and down River Street in front of the theatre as quickly as he could, even though it was damn near 1AM and we were trying to wrangle everyone into the theatre to watch the movie. And just getting to hang out with those guys. If you were a teenager in Santa Cruz in the late 80s, you probably already know the story about my movie parties with Boingo. But I digress. Despite exceptional reviews from critics and a career-making performance from Mr. Phillips, La Bamba would only open to fifth place in its opening weekend with $5.65m in ticket sales, although its per screen average would beat both Summer School and Superman IV (the other new wide releases that weekend). But it would have far stronger legs than the other two films, grossing more than $54.2m after twenty-six weeks in theatres. The soundtrack to the film, which featured several covers of Valens’ songs by Los Lobos, would top the Billboard album charts in the late summer, selling more than two million copies.
While not one of Carl Reiner’s best movies, Summer School is just entertaining enough for a mild recommendation. Mark Harmon plays Freddy Shoop, a high school gym teacher who is blackmailed into teaching a remedial English class for the summer instead of being able to take his planned Hawaiian vacation with his girlfriend. As you can imagine for a high school-based comedy from the mid to late 1980s, the teenagers are all a bunch of misfits, and Shoop has to go above and beyond his regular teaching responsibilities to get each of them to pass the class, lest he loses his tenure at school should any of them fail.
Although I am not that big of a horror film fan, my two favorite characters in Summer School are the horror film-obsessed students and friends Dave and “Chainsaw,” the latter of which would become a career-defining role for Dean Cameron.
Surprisingly, Summer School would end up the highest grossing new movie of the weekend, bringing in $6.01m in its first five days of release. It would continue to play in theatres throughout the rest of summer and well into the fall, long after school was back in session. After twenty-three weeks of release, Summer School would end its theatrical run with $35.66m in ticket sales.
When it was announced in 1985 that low-budget B-movie impresarios Menachem Golan and Yoram Globus of Cannon Films would be in charge of the making of the fourth film in the Superman series, fans of The Man of Steel knew the series they had come to love was over. Not that the story was necessarily bad. Conceived by Christopher Reeve, the film would find Superman deciding the world could not be trusted with an escalating nuclear arms race, so he takes all of the nuclear warheads from the world, puts them in a big net and hurls them into the Sun. But due to a weird set of circumstances at the same time, a sort-of anti-Superman called Nuclear Man is created, and now Superman must deal with the unintended consequences of his actions. The biggest problem with this film is that Cannon, due to a cash crunch after trying to become a global cinema superpower too quickly, would cut the budget of the film from $36m to $17m just before the film went into production, and replaced the special effects team from the first three Superman movies with a far less experienced company.
Hampered by a massive critical backlash, Superman IV would open to $5.68m in ticket sales in its first weekend, and would be gone from theatres outside of dollar houses after only three weeks. Its final gross of $15.6m will forever be the lowest grossing Superman movie released into theatres. Christopher Reeve would never return to the role of Superman, although there would be an unintended benefit from his making the movie. Part of his agreement to make this film was that Cannon would also have to finance the making of the film he really wanted to make, Street Smart, where he plays a struggling reporter who invents a story about a local street pimp, only to be targeted by a local street pimp who thinks the story is about him. That pimp would be played by Morgan Freeman, who at the time was a struggling 49-year-old actor still best known for playing Easy Reader on the PBS children’s show The Electric Company. Freeman would be a surprise Best Supporting Actor Nominee at that year’s Academy Awards, and even Freeman would acknowledge his role in Street Smart to be his breakthrough role. So you have Christopher Reeve to thank for Morgan Freeman.
This British drama would introduce the world to a fresh and exciting new actress, sixteen-year-old Emily Lloyd, who plays a sixteen-year-old rebellious school girl in a small English coastal town in the early 1950s who must deal with an unplanned pregnancy when she is knocked up by a friend of her father’s. Ms. Lloyd would be named the Best Actress of 1987 by The British Film Awards and the American critics’ group The National Society of Film Critics, and she would also be nominated for a BAFTA for Best Actress. But, sadly, Ms. Lloyd would suffer from a variety of mental issues caused by a sexual assault by a family friend when she was five, and she would slowly fade out of what should have been an incredible career because mental health wasn’t taken as seriously then as now. (She was the first choice to play Vivian in Pretty Woman, which she had to turn down because of a previous commitment to star in the 1990 Cher movie Mermaids, from which she would be fired for erratic behavior. She would also be fired from the 1992 Woody Allen movie Husbands and Wives for similar problems.)
The film, the directorial debut of Mona Lisa co-writer David Leland, would open on two screens at the Lincoln Plaza Cinemas in midtown Manhattan, and would gross $43,611 in its first three days. After 23 weeks in theatres, never playing in more than 43 theatres in any week, the film would end its American theatrical run with $3.28m in ticket sales.
For the weekend of July 23rd, 1982, the top ten movies in America were:
1) Robocop (Orion)
$6,332,716 from 1585 theatres.
$18.70m gross to date after two weeks.
2) Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (Disney)
$6,049,372 from 1729 theatres.
$19.69m gross to date after two weeks (50th Anniversary reissue).
3) Summer School (Paramount)
$6,012,000 from 1366 theatres.
$8.11m after five days.
4) Superman IV: The Quest for Peace (Warners/Cannon)
$5,683,122 from 1511 theatres.
$5.68m after three days.
5) La Bamba (Columbia)
$5,651,990 from 1251 theatres.
$5.7m after five days.
6) Jaws: The Revenge (Universal)
$3,561,200 from 1611 theatres.
$14.04m after two weeks.
7) Full Metal Jacket (Warners)
$3,320,220 from 917 theatres.
$26.81m after five weeks.
8) Dragnet (Universal)
$2,917,545 from 1059 theatres.
$44.2m after five weeks.
9) Revenge of the Nerds II: Nerds in Paradise (Fox)
$2,660,374 from 1283 theatres
$21.28m after thee weeks.
10) Adventures in Babysitting (Disney/Touchstone)
$2,579,377 from 1116 theatres.
$22.15m after four weeks.