Remember When They Thought the Action Film Was Dying Out?

Probably not. But that was the way the entertainment press was talking circa 1990, believe it or not.

What brought that on? Simply put, the style of action film that dominated the '80s was looking increasingly decadent between the ever-bigger budgets and ever-sillier results, while the grosses were hitting a limit--with this underlined by sinking franchises.

Thus Rambo: First Blood, Part II was a cultural phenomenon in 1985.

Rambo III was . . . not. This "most expensive film ever made" (capped off by Rambo's joust-like charge in a hijacked Soviet battle tank at a Hind helicopter) was received by many as laughable rather than exciting, as it took in one-third what its predecessor did at the box office.

So did it go with other films like the same year's The Dead Pool, and Red Heat, and the following year's Red Scorpion, and Tango & Cash (and in their different ways the "young adult" version of Rambo that was Disney's The Rescue and that James Bond-redone-as-'80s-action movie Licence to Kill), while even as it became a big hit the $50 million Lethal Weapon 2, with its bomb-in-the-toilet and the bad guys' house sliding down a hill, seemed to testify to the difficulty of "going bigger" as much as Rambo III (and Tango & Cash) did.

This may have been all the more the case with the films losing their thematic charge as the "post-Vietnam" sentiment waned, the moral panic over drugs and crime probably began to burn itself out, and the culture went increasingly "ironic"--and the following year did not change that. In the summer of 1990 the studios backed Total Recall and Die Hard 2 with Rambo III-like budgets in the hopes of seeing the movies achieve commensurately high ticket sales--and did not quite see their hopes fulfilled. Meanwhile the sequels to Robocop and Predator did not do quite so well as hoped, either.

At the same time they watched the romantic comedy Pretty Woman, the romance-cum-supernatural thriller Ghost and the family slapstick comedy Home Alone top the box office that year.

This, they said, is how the box office is going to be trending.

It made for a headline-grabbing narrative--the more in as this was the period of the last really big "moral panic" about violence in popular culture. But it was not really true. Rather those who made the judgment would have done better to pay attention to how big Batman had been the year before, and Dick Tracy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were that year--and even the success of The Hunt for Red October (the last three films all placing among the ten biggest moneymakers of the year). Scaled-up adventures with heavy military hardware helped keep something of the '80s-style action movie going through the '90s, while even if the injection of that element extended its life only so much, the superhero movies showed how the genre was tending. The action movie was not passing, but evolving--such that the superheroes dominate the big screen as the romantic comedies and other such films have been relegated to the small.