What was the last number one movie of the 1970s?
After the sunshine idealism of the 1960s, the 1970s were always going to be a difficult decade to survive. The optimism that defined the Sexual Revolution was only going to last for so long before a pragmatic scepticism quickly took its place.
This would, of course, quickly leak into mainstream culture, trickling into the kind of hell-raising music you could find in underground bars, and onto the big screen: When the promise of brighter days turns out to be a stinking lie, the kinds of stories being told only follow suit. Despondent, darker, and grittier cinema became popular, such as Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece, Taxi Driver.
However, one can’t bury his head in too many layers of sand for fear of never seeing the sunlight again; the general mood was that people needed distractions, and they needed them fast. Big, vibrant, flashy disco music topped the charts, matched with bell-bottoms and platform shoes. We can thank, in part, the spectacular Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, which was released in 1977.
By the end of the decade, this escapist shift had transformed from cliché stadium rock and disco funk to a supernatural means of leaving earth behind. At the beginning of 1979, Superman was the best-seller at the box office; it grossed over $13million in the four-day weekend, which ended on January 1st, beating the record set by Star Wars in its 1978 reissue.
Throughout the first half of the year, action films and thrillers would fight for the box office top spot with more experimental comedies, like the comedy-horror Love at First Bite, which reached the box office top spot on its fourth week of release.
Movie-goers with an eye for the wacky and the weird would be treated to an even bigger feast with the release of Ridley Scott’s cult classic, Alien, which sat at the top spot for three weeks, only to be kicked out by Rocky II. In a battle of household names, the James Bond instalment Moonraker then went on to pose deadly opposition to Rocky II.
From there, the fight for box office top spot might’ve been anyone’s guess: each contender had its moment, usually for no more than two weeks, such as The Muppet Movie, North Dallas Forty, Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Starting Over, and When a Stranger Calls.
None of these, however, would be able to take the final crowning spot: Instead, Star Trek: The Motion Picture ended the year in rather circular fashion, calling back to its other extra-terrestrial 1979 release, which had ushered the year in so nicely.
It was a triumphant success as the numbers go: officially, it grossed $11,926,421 nationally from all markets for the weekend ended December 9th, beating the previous three-day weekend record of $10.3m set by Superman. A hearty battle which shows the heyday of cinema in its formation. As Captain Kirk says in the 1979 release, “What it needs in order to evolve… is a human quality. Our capacity to leap beyond logic.”
Here we have it, folks.
