Forty-seven years ago today, everything changed. True believers might already know what it was: On May 25, 1977, Star Wars hit movie theaters and irrevocably altered nearly everything pertaining to the act of moviegoing. Lines around the block, overly excited nerds, an appetite for action figures.
Star Wars taught Hollywood that certain genres—sci-fi, fantasy, anything that percolated in the offbeat TV shows, books, and comics of the 1950s and ’60s—had fans, and those fandoms would show up. Star Wars made a meager $1.6 million in the US in its opening weekend.
But people kept coming back, and by the end of its initial run it had made more than $300 million. Hollywood’s Next Big Thing had arrived. Common wisdom dictates that Jaws , which came out in 1975 and made some $260 million , was the first summer blockbuster.
That’s true, but it was Star Wars that shifted the idea of what kind of film future popcorn flicks tried to be. In the years after its release, a trove of sci-fi and genre films landed in theaters: Blade Runner , Alien , E.T.
, the Mad Max sequel The Road Warrior . By the ’90s, the summer movie energy had shifted to action fare— Twister , Speed , Jurassic Park, Independence Day —but nerd stuff still ruled. For every Forrest Gump there was a Batman Returns or Terminator 2: Judgment Day .
Then came a little juggernaut called Marvel . By the time Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies started clearing nine-figure opening weekends in the aughts, it was obvious.
