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The Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982
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Richard Rushfield

The Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982

An extraordinary eight films in eight weeks changed Hollywood

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Richard Rushfield
Jul 19, 2024
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ALIEN AMONG US E.T. grossed more than $313 million domestically in 1982, which is more than $1 billion in today’s dollars. (Photo illustration by The Ankler; (Archive Photos/Moviepix)

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Chris Nashawaty’s new book, The Future Was Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982, deals with perhaps the most extraordinary, impactful eight-week period in movie history. Within the course of just two months, eight films were released that changed the course of the industry: The Road Warrior (a.k.a. Mad Max 2), E.T., Poltergeist, Conan the Barbarian, Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan, Tron, The Thing and Blade Runner — the final two opening on the same day.

These films met with very different fates in their initial runs but all eight of them endured to — for very different reasons — enter the canon to be considered classics today. I spoke with Chris (also a periodic guest editor at The Ankler) about this incredible moment and its lessons for us today.

Richard Rushfield: So what happened in 1982? What was in the water then? How did this spark sci-fi madness that hasn’t really been seen before or since?

Chris Nashawaty: Hollywood is such a big battleship, it takes time to course correct. So if you want to see why a movie exists or a trend of movies exist, you really need to look five years earlier to see what happened that they were all reacting to. In 1977, five years before 1982, we had the release of Star Wars, which coming on the heels of Jaws, introduced the concept of the blockbuster. This is old news, but what’s interesting is how the studios reacted to Star Wars. They could have just really kept doing what they were doing making Burt Reynolds and Dolly Parton movies.

But they realized that there’s this untapped market of nerds who will go see a movie not once, but maybe four or five times, and ask, how do we appeal to that audience? At the time, the studios were being run by people who were willing to take risks, and they sort of hustled into development science-fiction movies to capitalize on the success of Star Wars. So this all comes together in the summer of ‘82, where it’s this eight-car pile up in an eight-week window.

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RR: Collectively, how did these movies change Hollywood?

CN: I don’t think that the change that these films spawned was overnight. These films had very, very different connections with the audience at the time. What I think of as the two most indelible sci-fi movies in the canon of these eight are the two that probably fared the worst at the box office: Blade Runner and The Thing. They came out on the same day, which I still find miraculous. They both got very mixed to negative reviews. Blade Runner ended up doing okay, not great, and The Thing was just reviled.

Time has been kind to these films.

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