I was just making a point in another thread and stumbled upon something interesting, why don't we just keep adding interesting stuff into one kind of giant trivia page I'll update and categorize. To start I found this odd. In 1980, we also just think of it as another huge Star Wars year.

But 2-5 on the domestic chart from that year all came within the same week, Dec 12-19th.

2. Kramer vs. Kramer 106 million (427 million)
3. 9 to 5 103 million (403 million today)
4. Stir Crazy 101 million (405 million adjusted, why is it higher thenumbers?)
5. Any Which Way you Can 70 million (283 million)

Yeah, I love stuff like that. They would have played in theatres for most of 1981. Huge no matter how you look at it.

I could be wrong but that top 4 UN-adjusted looks not far off Dec 2023 numbers....

Kramer vs Kramer was December 1979, I always loved that it was #1 of its year over Superman. The numbers chart looks a little messed up in that it's counting that for calendar year 1980 but the others for total, probably due to not having info. Also Airplane is in there.

I remember looking up the inflated gross chart and the Eastwood Orangutan movie Every Which Way But Loose was the biggest movie I've never heard of before at 473 mil adjusted. The movie on the above list is the sequel and still did pretty decent.

your absolutely right, I saw it the second I posted it. Honestly I think that is the dumbest bit of data both bom and numbers do. I just saw the dates. But yeah 2-5 were comedies, one very female centric.

Any Which Way is so interesting, its definitely in that Smokey and Bandit type of popularity, I actually think Any Which way was the third highest opening of all time at the time, I think just ST the motion picture and Smokey and the bandit were higher, other films had bigger weekends in their runs though at that point. It's also kind of interesting that looking back on the yearly stats, while Memorial Day is usually the kick off and has a top earner of the year almost every year, it's usually just one weekend in May, the every weekend in May thing really only started to happen in 1998.

Every Which Way But Loose and Every Which Way You Can were always on TV in the 80s so I watched them often when I was a kid. When I saw it's gross in Variety in the 90s I wasn't surprised. Seemed like a huge family film starring a huge star.

May/June 1989 is perhaps one of the most interesting box office periods ever.

May 25-27 - IJ3 breaks the OW record with $29,355,021.

Jun 16-18 - 3 weeks later, Ghostbusters II breaks the OW record with $29,472,894, beating IJ3 by just $118K.

June 23-25 - 1 week later, Batman opens and breaks the OW record with $40,489,746.

Can you imagine the OW record being broken THREE times in just 5 weekends?!

Meanwhile aside from those films, you also had other films making good money like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Dead Poets Society, Do the Right Thing, Star Trek V, Field of Dreams, See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Road House.

Closest I can think of is 01/02 from Hannibal, The Mummy 2, Planet of the Apes, Rush Hour 2, HP1 and Spider-man all breaking the top 4 OW's rankings over a 14 month period.

Summer 1989 also known as the first true megaplex summer is one of the all-time greats. All hotly anticipated sequels or franchises. The original won out in the end. Batman had that incredible footage of people lining up for blocks to go see it. Sure we'd see that from time to time in the 90s with Jurassic, Batman Forever, ID4 and Phantom Menace - but it is a relic of a bygone era.

I guess May 2007 tried to replicate this to mixed success with third instalments of Spidey, POTC and Shrek.