The only movie to reach number one at the box office in three different decades
The practice of shoving a picture back out onto theatres is a lot older than you think.
In fact, it’s as old as Hollywood. Back in the silent era, all the major studios were faced with the headache of mass piracy rife among the many unscrupulous exhibitors willing to illegally screen a reel for a quick buck, and so the need to push the real thing prompted movieland to give their back catalogue a second or third roll of the box office dice. Some, like William Fox, who later founded his namesake media empire, would raid his old archive and slap a new title on a previously released picture before such duplicity was outlawed.
But without resorting to dodgy title revisions, Hollywood eagerly sought to inject some further life into their film canon. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Charlie Chaplin reissued his silent classics to capitalise on the ‘talkie’ trend, including a narration on 1925’s The Gold Rush, and DW Griffith oversaw a sound re-release of his racist silent drama The Birth of a Nation.
And so it went. Legend has it that Disney operated on an ‘every seven years’ strategy when rolling out their animated features for theatre repeats, and the Universal monsters would find unnatural life across the horror mania that extended well into the B-movie drive-ins, a good 20 years after Dracula and Frankenstein first spooked the silver screen.
Today, the advances in 3D have seen Finding Nemo, Avatar, and Jurassic Park all enjoying ticket sales years after their debut, and when it comes to the auteurs’ endless tinkering, Apocalypse Now, Blade Runner, and The Exorcist have all seen rejigged versions given the theatrical thumbs up from their respective directors.
So, what is the only movie to reach number one in three different decades?
You knew it was coming. The grandaddy of rereleases, George Lucas’ little Buck Rogers space opera stands as the ultimate fucked-about-with franchise, Star Wars counting its first ever amendment back in 1977 with some adjustments to the credits and special effects even after its initial limited release.
Yet, reaching number one at the US box office in three different decades? Really? We all remember the big 1990s re-release, the revamped and digitally glossed Star Wars trilogy that boasted the day’s CGI innovations and launched the ‘who shot first?’ Greedo controversy. While receiving further do-overs in later DVD releases, the all-new Star Wars indeed topped the ticket sales charts for three weeks across February 1997.
So what about the third? Only four years after its 1977 box office debut smash, boasting a staggering 20 non-consecutive weeks as America’s favourite blockbuster, Lucas decided to give Star Wars its first significant re-release in April 1981, anticipating the grander saga to come by adding the “Episode IV” and “A New Hope” to the famous opening crawl, as well as tinkering with the chase sequence at the beginning. It was another hit, sitting at the top spot for a respectable two weeks.
With news that Lucasfilm owner Disney is set to release the original Star Wars in its unaltered form next year for the 50th anniversary, who’s betting that sci-fi fantasy that just won’t die counts a fourth decade to its box office record?
