Do You Remember Which Movies Topped the Box Office 40 Years Ago Today?
The weekend of May 17, 1985, was a slow one at the U.S. box office — so slow, in fact, that Beverly Hills Cop was still riding high at No. 3, nearly half a year after its release. But without new blockbusters, that weekend’s box office ranking offers some deep cuts from 1980s cinema. Does the film Gotcha! ring any bells? Does anyone remember Rustlers’ Rhapsody? Flashback to that weekend 40 years ago
5 Rustlers’ Rhapsody: $1.75 million
Written and directed by Hugh Wilson and released one week prior, Rustlers’ Rhapsody starred Tom Berenger as “Greatest Fast-Drawin’, Fancy-Dressin’, Silver-Spurred, Geetar Playin’, Singing Cowboy movie matinee idol Rex O’Herlihan” in a parody of 1940s Western movies.
The film also featured G.W. Bailey, Marilu Henner, Andy Griffith, and Sela Ward. But moviegoers weren’t impressed — the film only grossed $6.09 million — and neither were critics: the Chicago Tribune called it “a parody in search of a joke,” and Henner was nominated for a Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actress.
4Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment: $1.84 million
Rustlers’ Rhapsody got outranked that weekend by a sequel to 1984’s Police Academy, a film that Wilson had directed and Bailey had appeared in. In Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Captain Pete Lassard (Howard Hesseman) assigns Police Academy grads to a crime-ridden precinct, while Lieutenant Ernie Mauser (Art Metrano) sabotages their efforts out of self-promotion.
Despite bad reviews, Police Academy 2 earned $23.7 million in the first 10 days after its March 1985 debut, en route to a total domestic gross of $55.6 million — in what was then the largest springtime opening in box-office history, according to the Los Angeles Times.
3 Beverly Hills Cop: $1.88 million
Even though it came out in December 1984, the action comedy Beverly Hills Cop was still playing in 912 theaters during the weekend of May 17, 1985, and it would eventually earn more than $234 million at the U.S. box office. In fact, Beverly Hills Cop ranks as the highest-grossing R-rated film released since 1977, when adjusted for inflation, according to The Numbers.
Beverly Hills Cop starred Eddie Murphy as a Detroit detective visiting Beverly Hills, California, to investigate the murder of his friend. Sylvester Stallone was originally going to star in the picture, though, and he even rewrote the script to swap out the comedy for gritty violence, according to Film School Rejects.
2 Gotcha!: $1.92 million
The spy comedy Gotcha! was three weeks into its theatrical run during this weekend in May 1985. Director Jeff Kanew reunited with his Revenge of the Nerds star Anthony Edwards for this film, in which the future ER actor played as a college student pulled into an espionage operation by the mysterious woman (played by Linda Fiorentino) he meets while vacationing in Paris.
Gotcha! didn’t exactly get moviegoers, though — The film only grossed $10.8 million domestically — nor did critics appreciate the effort. “Gotcha! misfires, not so much for its premise but because of the intermittent crassness that mars its development,” said the Los Angeles Times. The New York Times, meanwhile, said the film “is about as devoid of personality as it’s possible for a narrative movie to be.”
1 Code of Silence: $2.80 million
Code of Silence opened the same day as Gotcha! but fared much better. In the action drama, a pre-Walker, Texas Ranger Chuck Norris played a Chicago police sergeant trying to break up a gang while also breaking the “code of silence” that otherwise would have protected a corrupt cop.
Screenwriters Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack wrote Code of Silence as a fourth Dirty Harry film before they and Mike Gray reworked it as a standalone film. The film, directed by Andrew Davis, earned Norris some of the best positive reviews of his career, as he told The New York Times. It eventually grossed $20.3 million in the United States, Norris’ second-best box-office result for a film he headlines.
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