Some of the world’s most respected directors had their movies released on the same December weekend in 1984 – resulting in a number of flops… December is a busy month for movies, as studios take advantage of the winter nights and holiday season to sell their latest output. Some of the biggest hits ever have ... December 1984’s incredibly strange box office weekend
Some of the world’s most respected directors had their movies released on the same December weekend in 1984 – resulting in a number of flops…
December is a busy month for movies, as studios take advantage of the winter nights and holiday season to sell their latest output. Some of the biggest hits ever have emerged around Christmastime, at least in the US: the likes of Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, to name a few.
It’s also the time of year when studios tend to release their big Oscar contenders; its proximity to the awards season, the thinking goes, means that movies are more likely to be fresh in voters’ minds if they’re put out just before nominations are chosen.
All of which might explain why, on the 14th December 1984, some of the era’s most respected filmmakers had their movies appear on the exact same day. Some were intended as crowd-pleasing blockbusters intended to draw in audiences enjoying a few days off work; others were prestige films with one eye on Oscar glory. Most of them had huge budgets; just about all of them underperformed.
Of that glut of movies, Dune was perhaps the most hyped. Directed by David Lynch and based on Frank Herbert’s sprawling space fantasy novel, it was widely expected to capture the same audience as Star Wars. Before filming began, there were already plans to turn it into a trilogy, much like George Lucas’ franchise, and its release was accompanied by action figures, sticker books and other merchandise.
It’s fair to say that Lynch didn’t have quite the same childlike sensibility as Lucas, however, and true to form, the filmmaker packed Dune with violent, surreal images that looked rather out of place on a trading card.
Dune was also, famously, an immensely troubled production, beset by illness, power cuts, cost overruns, the abrupt departure of its VFX supervisor (cheerio, John Dykstra), and clashes over duration and tone. “I loved Dino [De Laurentiis] and Raffaella,” Lynch solemnly said of his producers, “but it was a nightmare. A nightmare.”
At an estimated cost of $40m, Dune was one of 1984’s most expensive movies. And while it was later hailed as a cult classic, at the time it fell far short of expectations – failing even to hit the top of the US box office on its opening weekend. (We’ll get to why shortly.)
If the critical and financial failure of Dune left Lynch reeling, he could at least content himself with the knowledge that his twisted fantasy epic still wasn’t the most expensive failure of that December weekend.
Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, period drama The Cotton Club somehow cost even more to make than Dune: a startling $58m, making it by far the most expensive film of 1984. As a comparison, Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, with its multiple locations and complex action set-pieces, cost $28m; Ghostbusters, which contained multiple effects shots, ate up roughly $25m.
In fairness, The Cotton Club itself required the construction of numerous large sets for its lavish re-creation of 1920s and 30s New York. And like Dune, there were high hopes for The Cotton Club. Specifically, that it might repeat the success of The Godfather over a decade earlier – that film being both a critical darling and a box office sensation. Both films shared the same producer – Robert Evans, who wanted to direct at one stage – as well as Coppola and Mario Puzo, the latter initially charged with writing the adapted screenplay.
The Cotton Club was beset by production chaos, however, with millions spent before cameras even rolled, and the script was re-written dozens of times over the course of its making. There were also some extraordinary financial problems going on behind the scenes; we won’t go too deeply into the details here, but things were murky enough that Evans’ ex-girlfriend, Karen Greenberger, was among four people convicted of murder in 1991.
Going back to December 1984, The Cotton Club fared even worse at the box office than Dune, making $2.9m on its opening weekend. All told, it made around $25m in cinemas – less than half its investment. Evans and Coppola very publicly fell out over who exactly was to blame for the film’s failure – though unlike Dune, The Cotton Club at least found favour with critics. While it was no Godfather, Coppola’s glamorous drama about musicians and gangsters still scooped up numerous award nominations, including two at the Oscars.
The problem for both Lynch and Coppola wasn’t so much that they were competing with each other on that winter’s day in 1984. Rather, they were competing with a brash Detroit cop cackling and wisecracking his way around a posh area of Los Angeles. Beverly Hills Cop was released on the 5th December, and it’s fair to say that nobody expected it to become the box office phenomenon of the year; made for just $13m, the comedy thriller made $320m worldwide and turned Eddie Murphy into one of the decade’s biggest film stars.
Neither Dune nor The Cotton Club could dislodge Beverly Hills Cop from the top of the US box office on the 14th December; indeed, Coppola’s film was so slow to catch on that it landed at number three, behind the sci-fi sequel 2010: The Year We Make Contact.
Drowned out by the catchy groove of Axel F, other seasoned filmmakers also struggled to be heard that weekend. John Carpenter’s Starman – a sci-fi romance designed as a palette cleanser after the icy horror of 1982’s The Thing – also came out on the 14th December, and debuted at number six with a take of about $2.9m. Michael Crichton’s sci-fi cop thriller Runaway was just behind at number seven, having made $1.1m on its opening weekend.
The weekend was so busy that cinema-goers almost certainly overlooked Mass Appeal, a comedy-drama starring Jack Lemmon, or director Michael Radford’s unsparingly desolate adaptation of Nineteen Eighty-Four, which sat rather uncomfortably among the month’s more bombastic offerings.
It was certainly a contrast to A Passage To India, director David Lean’s triumphant return to the screen following a 14-year hiatus. Based on the EM Forster novel of the same name, it was filled with majestic landscapes and a lush score by Maurice Jarre. The very definition of a prestige film, it hardly mattered that A Passage To India emerged during such a busy period; it kept drawing audiences well into March the following year, bolstered by its attention at the Academy Awards, where it was nominated for 11 Oscars. All told, A Passage To India made $40m worldwide in cinemas – not a blockbuster, but well in excess of its $14.5m budget.
Even by the standards of a typical December weekend, that Friday at the tail end of 1984 was an unusually busy one for cinemas. Certainly, it’s difficult to think of another day in which quite so many well-known filmmakers released their movies all at once. It was noted at the time that, in what looked like a banner year for the US film industry, studios had likely lost more money than they’d invested in the final months of 1984.
“On a profit and loss basis over the last six months,” former 20th Century Fox executive Robert Cort told the New York Times in early 1985, “the movie industry was one of the most depressed industries in the United States. If you take out the $100m Paramount will get from Beverly Hills Cop, the other studios lost somewhere around $160m over Christmas.”
In retrospect, it seems rather self-defeating that studios would put out their most expensive films on the same day. But taking ticket sales and money out of the equation, something else is noteworthy about those 14th December movies: just about all of them are still worth talking about and dissecting over 40 years later.
