1988: THE LAST GREAT YEAR FOR MOVIES

1988: The Last Great Year for Movies 

By Barry Dutter

In the late 1980s, I used to go to the movies all the time with my friends. We were in our mid-twenties, we had crappy jobs and we were broke all the time, but the movies provided cheap entertainment to us at least once a week, sometimes twice.

I remember 1988 in particular because that was the year that we all moved from dreary New Jersey to Southern California. And there was an impressive variety of quality movies released that year.

Let’s take a look at the Top Ten highest-grossing movies of 1988:

1) RAIN MAN

2) WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT

3) COMING TO AMERICA

4) BIG

5) TWINS

6) CROCODILE DUNDEE  II

7) DIE HARD

8) THE NAKED GUN

9) COCKTAIL

10) BEETLEJUICE

Now let’s look at the top 10 movies from 2014.



1. GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

2. HUNGER GAMES: MOCKINGJAY PART 1

3. CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE WINTER SOLDIER

4. THE LEGO MOVIE

5. TRANSFORMERS: AGE OF EXTINCTION

6. MALEFICENT

7. X-MEN: DAYS OF FUTURE PAST

8. DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

9. BIG HERO 6

10. THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2

(The next 3 movies on the list are the GODZILLA reboot, the sequel to the TV reboot 22 JUMP STREET, and the TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES reboot.)
Pretty sad comparison, huh? Many of the movies on the 1988 list are beloved classics. Most of the movies on the 2014 list are bloated, derivative big-budget action epics where you just shrug your shoulders and go, “Meh.”
Movies are so disposable and so generic these days, it’s hard to remember what the movie was about five minutes after it’s over.
1988 was notable because of the sheer lack of “franchise“ films that came out that year. Consider: The STAR WARS trilogy had ended five years before, with George Lucas vowing to never make another film in his epic space fantasy saga. The series of Christopher Reeve SUPERMAN films had come to an inglorious end the year before with the abysmal SUPERMAN IV. The first of the big-budget BATMAN films was still a year away, as was the “conclusion” of the INDIANA JONES “trilogy.”
The TERMINATOR sequel was only a rumor at that point. Even GHOSTBUSTERS 2 was still a year away.
So with hardly any sequels or super-hero movies to see in theaters, what did movie-goers do? They went to see original movies instead.
The biggest hit of the year was RAIN MAN, a movie which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. In second place at the box office was WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, a ground-breaking animation/live action hybrid. Next up was COMING TO AMERICA, one of Eddie Murphy’s all-time best comedies. Then we had BIG starring Tom Hanks, another timeless tale.
Then came TWINS, which was a dopy movie, but not without its charms. The first sequel on the list, CROCODILE DUNDEE II, comes in at #6. Then we have DIE HARD, perhaps the greatest action movie of all time. (Yes, DIE HARD later became a franchise, but at the time of its release, it was an untested concept starting an unproven TV actor who had never had a big hit movie before.)
Rounding out the top 10 were the hilarious NAKED GUN, the goofy but watchable COCKTAIL, and the bizarre and unforgettable BEETLEJUICE. 
Here is a partial list of some of the other memorable films that came out that year: A FISH CALLED WANDA. COLORS. BULL DURHAM. WORKING GIRL. SCROOGED. BEACHES. TUCKER. YOUNG GUNS. MIDNIGHT RUN. ALIEN NATION. BILOXI BLUES. DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS.
What an eclectic group of movies. You may not love all of them, but you must admit they are a diverse group.

It just seems like audiences were willing to embrace all different types of movies back in the late 80's. These days, it seems people don’t want to see any movie in a theater unless it has robots, superheroes, zombies, aliens, car chases, and lots of explosions.
I guess we only have only ourselves to blame. Studios give us what we want to see. When they make a serious drama, moviegoers generally stay home.
But it’s not only the fault of those of us who live in the US. It’s also the fault of filmgoers from around the world, who flock to see the latest superhero and sci-fi extravaganzas at the box office. Foreign box office now accounts for over 50% of a U.S. film’s total take. And nothing translates better overseas than superhero and action movies.
With the amount of money at stake, you can hardly blame studio execs for playing it safe and only approving the sequels and comic book-based properties that are almost guaranteed to be hits. 

Sequels are nothing new, of course They’ve been around since the dawn of movies, and yes, the 80’s had their share. Three of the top 20 movies released in 1988 were sequels: Rambo III, Nightmare on Elm Street 4, and Crocodile Dundee II.
This means that people who saw the top 20 movies of 1988 were treated to 17 original concepts.
Now let’s compare those numbers to the past few years.

Of the top 20 movies of 2012, 10 were sequels, remakes, or reboots. In 2013, 11 of the top 20. In 2014, it was 16 out of 20. When you look at just the top ten of each year, the numbers get even worse. In the past 3 years, roughly 90% of the movies in the top ten are installments of franchises, and a good chunk of those are based on comic books.

As a lifelong comics fan, it pains me to say this, but when it comes to story and characterization, superhero comics are not the best source material for movies. (Remember when movies used to be based on books? I mean, REAL books, like JAWS and THE GODFATHER? Remember books? But I digress…)

Comics were designed as a form of cheap entertainment that could be read in ten minutes. When you take a ten minute story and try to stretch it out over a two and a half hour movie, well, let’s just say plot and characterization are not the main strengths of most superhero movies. They all kind of blend together in a nonstop blur of pointless fight scenes, incoherent plots, and weak characterizations.

Marvel, of course, is responsible for the Comic book-ization of Hollywood starting with IRON MAN in 2008, because that was the first movie to get film-goers excited about the concept of a collective movie universe.

Sure, there were many comic book movies before, starring the likes of Spider-Man, Batman, Daredevil, Green Lantern, and the X-Men -- but those films were not part of a shared universe. IRON MAN was really the first film to launch the “Superhero Movie Universe” concept, where story threads and characters carry over from one series of films to another.

Marvel’s shared universe of films has proven so successful that it’s inspired DC Comics to launch their own universe of movies, which started with MAN OF STEEL in 2013. DC came very late to the “shared universe” party, but they’ve announced a plethora of upcoming of films of their own.

This has led to other studios figuring out how they could really milk their cash cows. Thus we will soon be treated to expanded universes of the X-MEN, SPIDER-MAN, FAST AND FURIOUS and TRANSFORMERS franchises.

Definitely makes me nostalgic for a time when we had more variety at the multiplex. I didn’t love all the movies made in 1988. Some of them I didn’t like much at all. ( I could’ve done without the Joe Piscopo/ Treat Williams zombie action comedy, DEAD HEAT, for instance.)

But the point is that we had variety. There were many different types of hit movies at the box office. These days, it seems like all the big movies consist of guys in costumes punching each other.

Movie-goers used to complain about all the sequels in the 70s, 80s and 90s, but we didn’t know how good we had it. Back then, Hollywood was still not afraid to take a chance on a new idea.

I know we’ll never see another year like 1988, but I will always look back at it as a golden year. It was one of the last years when we would go to the movies and actually see a movie instead of a two-hour toy commercial.

So am I saying that there haven't been any good movies since 1988? Of course I'm not saying that. In fact, in the 1990s, there was a welcome influx of visionary new directors like Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and the Wachowski Brothers. They brought us movies like RESERVOIR DOGS, THE MATRIX, and EL MARIACHI. Directors who first came on the scene in the 80s like Spike Lee and the Coen Brothers did some of their most memorable work in the 90s. And even an old war horse like Martin Scorcese proved he could still show those young bucks how it's done by making the best movie of the decade, GOODFELLAS.
The big difference was that movies like that were not the biggest films of the year. Quirky low-budget films had to play second fiddle to an increasing number of sequels.

The 90s were one last gasp for creativity and originality in the movie business before the monsters, robots, aliens and super-heroes took over.  

Now it seems like we're stuck in a cycle where there are about 40 or 50 ongoing franchises -- almost enough for one new franchise film every weekend. At one time, movies series used to stop with trilogies. But the thinking these days is that there is no need for any franchise to stop -- ever. As long as a film series keeps making money, the studios will keep cranking them out. 

And if a film series does stop making money, they will just put it on hold for a few years and then reboot it

Definitely makes you miss the days when you would go to the movies and be pleasantly surprised by what you saw. I will never forget that magical year of 1988, when it seemed like the movies still had the ability to show you things you hadn't seen before. These days, it's just the same old, same old.

I blame you, Megatron! (Or whatever the hell your name is!)