1985 v 2025 at the Box Office

If you’ve read any of my writing, you’ll know I go on almost endlessly about how studios and filmmakers have lost their way when it comes to entertaining an audience. I also tell anyone who’ll listen that yes, kids today have more distractions, but I argue the content being offered in the theaters is not helping the decline of movies as an entertainment option. Quite simply, not enough of us are being given a compelling reason to regularly show up at the theatre. Their popcorn isn’t that delicious if the movie sucks, and too often lately, the movie sucks.

Now that we have begun a new year, let’s see if my argument holds water, by comparing the top 2025 box office earners with those from a simpler time, 1985. For those not old enough to remember 1985 – it was a year where VCR sales boomed, and Blockbuster Video was born. So don’t come at me saying movie theatres had a distraction free landscape.

Here are the top 10 films from 40 years ago – from a USA box office perspective:

Also lurking in the top 20 were films like The Breakfast Club, Mask, Pee-wee’s Big Adventure, and the Clint Eastwood Western Pale Rider.

Let’s be honest – no matter how old you are, you’ve heard of most of these movies, and probably seen more than half at least once. There are several iconic movies in that list, and a pretty diverse array of genres aimed at a diverse array of people. Right now – if you sat down and watched that top 10, and maybe a couple of the extra ones, you’d have an entertaining few days, because there isn’t a shameless studio grab for cash among them – apart from Rocky IV.

Now let’s look at the 2025 top 10 by box office returns in the USA:

Lurking in the top 20 are F1, Weapons, and the last Mission Impossible – which let’s be honest, is unwatchable slop.  

How many on that list are going to be classics we still think of fondly 40 years from now? Be honest – how excited are you to sit down with that list over a few days? How many of those are aimed at anything other than families and young teens? Thank goodness Sinners is there, or it would be an awfully cynical studio list.

Say what you like about ‘kids today’. Say what you like about social media, and attention spans, and our inability to engage socially. Then look me in the eye and say if we were given a list of movies comparable in quality, timelessness, diversity and entertainment value in 2025 that we were given in 1985 – we’d be complaining about ‘kids today’ or the health of movies as a viable entertainment option. Then tell me the studios today aren’t heaping their financial viability on the shoulders of far fewer age brackets of human beings. They are clearly relying on the very teenagers everyone says is too distracted to go to the movies… to go to the movies en masse, based on what they’re offering. And clearly those distracted folks showed up – it’s everyone else that was almost entirely ignored.

Don’t believe me? Think about #1 – Minecraft – and how it filled theatres with 14 year old boys throwing popcorn, cheering the opening credits, and singing along to their favorite chicken song. I was in one of those theatres – and it was thrilling. These are the kids blamed for abandoning the cinema – and yet their movie made it to #1. Then compare the demographic reach of 1985’s #1. I was in a movie theatre built in the parking lot of a shopping mall in Athens, Georgia in 1985 as a 17 year old seeing Back to the Future with a cinema full of people… of all ages… enthusiastically engaged watching Marty McFly fend off his horny mother.

Our desire for the shared experience in the movie theatre is not dead. It’s dulled – largely because it’s been shamefully narrowed by cynical corporations who seem a lot less interested in providing genuine entertainment for everyone. The lists don’t lie. When we’re reduced to Tom Cruise trying to ‘save cinema’ by thinking more and more outlandish stunts shoved into a gibberish story will qualify as ‘entertainment’, you know movies are in a dark place.

1985’s list gave us diversity, but all of these films were shooting for entertainment. Not trying to sell us a theme park ride, or exploit a video game, or a Broadway Musical, or a very old comic book. Entertainment led the way. You cannot look at the 2025 list and say it leads the way now. If it did – Superman wouldn’t exist.

Somewhere over the last 40 years the people who green light big movies have left the audience behind. They are more concerned with exploiting their properties than entertaining a crowd. If they weren’t…the latest Jurassic Park wouldn’t exist.

We are now cattle, to be exploited or completely ignored.  Mostly the latter. We are not people to be given a good time. Look at these lists, and tell me it ain’t so. And then keep your fingers crossed that at some point, someone will figure this out, and start genuinely thinking about what more of us may enjoy seeing. At which time… I’m confident we’ll go see it. Because the popcorn is delicious when the movie doesn’t suck.