Remembering the Summer Movie Season of 1989

Looking back the summer of 1989 is probably when I first noticed all the talk about the box office--partly because there was so much of it.

At the time the press was buzzing with excitement about Hollywood's "first $2 billion summer," which was to play such a part in the later excitement about its "first $5 billion year."

Of course, in making so much of the number there was the familiar combination of fixation on the passing of some arbitrary threshold, complete lack of historical memory, disregard for the inflation of the dollar and ticket prices with it (all that math!), and breathless-hype-as-default-tone, exacerbated perhaps by the disappointments of the year before. (Consider how 1988 saw the big action movies underperform--as with Arnold Schwarzenegger's Red Heat, the fifth Dirty Harry movie The Dead Pool, and especially Sylvester Stallone's Rambo III--while even Die Hard failed to break the $100 million barrier, all of which doubtless made the grosses of Lethal Weapon 2, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and Batman the year after look the more impressive.*)

Still, it did have its share of hits, and whatever one makes of it it did convey a sense that this was an exciting time for movies--commercially, at least.

Artistically was a different matter.

So has it tended to remain even when Hollywood has a good summer, and a good year--the entertainment press apparently more inclined to think like "armchair executives" than "cinematic connoisseurs," and I suppose, encouraging the audience to do the same.

* The original Die Hard's domestic gross was actually just $83 million--on a $40 million budget--a far cry from what the second Rambo film or the Beverly Hills Cop action-comedies made, and for that matter, the return on investment achieved by films like Commando and Lethal Weapon.