Boxoffice Pro - Winter 2020

The experimental revolution
that swept the 1960s and 1970s
was all but dead and buried in the ’80s.
Summarizing the new decade, Peter
Biskind, author of Down and Dirty
Pictures, writes, “When the Ronald Reagan
tsunami swept everything before it, the
market replaced Mao, The Wall Street
Journal trumped The Little Red Book, and
supply-side economics supplanted the
power of the people.” The corporatization
of Reagan’s America, as well as its return
to conservatism, left Hollywood with little
interest in small, realistic, auteur-driven
films. Instead, it went all-in on megabuck
movies produced by mega-corporations to
be shown in megaplexes.
The Return of the Studios
Riding the blockbuster wave started
by Jaws and Star Wars in the previous
decade, Hollywood in the 1980s turned all
its efforts to the production of expensive
sci-fi, action, and horror blockbusters
like Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. What
Jaws had taught the industry was not only
the power of pricey special effects but
also that of huge marketing campaigns.
Skyrocketing marketing budgets
significantly inflated the price of films
in the 1980s. The MPAA’s president, Jack
Valenti, revealed in November 1980 that
in that year the average film made by the
major studios that made up the MPAA
cost $10 million before advertising and
prints, double the 1975 figure. Prints and
advertising added another whopping $6
million. According to Valenti, box office
grosses needed to reach about $40 million
for the studio to simply break even.
To guarantee maximum returns,
Hollywood’s high-concept blockbusters
became more and more homogenized.
Unlike their embrace of little-known actors
or even nonactors in the’60s and ’70s, the
studios increasingly relied on a small
number of very popular actors with a star
factor strong enough to make people show
up at the box office. Boxoffice Pro even
began publishing “box office attraction”
lists, ranking the most popular stars and
the most promising new actors based on
monthly surveys. Studios also invested
heavily in sequels to minimize risks.
Associate editor Jimmy Summers wrote
somewhat ironically about the trend in the
summer of 1983, when films like Return
of the Jedi, Rocky III, Superman III, and
Psycho II hit the screens. The “summer of
sequels appears to be the season in which
the actors do exactly what their public
wants them to do,” he wrote.
Higher production and marketing
costs proved a problem for exhibitors,
which were forced to raise their ticket
prices sometimes to as high as $6 or $7,
doubling 1970s prices. Between 1979 and
1980, when the average ticket price was
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