List of 1983 box office number-one films in the United States

Chevy Chase, superstar! Superman III, looking like shit despite the excellent previous movie becoming 1981's second highest-grossing film. Tom Selleck, box office champ!

Not a hot year. caught The Big Chill in cinema recently (as a mystery film - they do that at the prince charles cinema every week or so, to varying results depending on yr taste) - that is a film that has dated horrendously. Terms of Endearment has aged very well...

I'm probably gonna go Jedi here, mainly for nostalgia but actually most of the other stuff on this list is average to terrible.

Chevy Chase and Sigourney Weaver, directed by William Friedkin. Now, that's a team.

I don't think I've ever heard of Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone but it has the title thing down at least.

Chillhunter: Adventures In The Boomer Zone

In Superman III's mild defense: Christopher Reeve was never hotter than as Bad Drunk Superman.

Flashdance's title track is almost enough to give it a vote by itself

Spacehunter is kind of fun if you like the sort of sci-fi where the brig on a spaceship has dirty straw in it

Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone was another early 80s 3D revival hit, which is why it did such good business. First time I saw Molly Ringwald in anything.

When Chuck Norris has a number 1 box office movie…It’s not because people bought tickets. It’s because the other movies politely stepped aside.

Sorry I think i have to vote Vacation

the best answer is probably Return of the Jedi but I can't bring myself to vote for it

Mr. Mom was #1 five weeks.

A Christmas Story easily

A Christmas Story
Vacation
Terms of Endearment

I’ve actually watched/re-watched three of these in the last month. As a child, the scene the picture above comes from was one of the most terrifying things imaginable and I needed to cover my eyes from it. When I watched it again two weeks ago, I couldn’t believe how quick the transformation was.

Never seen Terms of Endearment but I would like too. Spring Break is the only title here that means nothing at all to me.

Voted Jedi solely on the basis of how I remember being a kid sitting in the dark watching that wide desert shot of R2 and 3PO and their arrival at that huge metal door and how exciting the whole thing seemed to me.

The special effects after the transformation are wretched -- like, network TV level.

Is that picture from Flashdance?

what a feelin'!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mnqB4Zd9DVM

The ADR on all of Annette O’Toole’s dialogue is particularly awful. The whole movie feels like most of the budget was spent on Richard Pryor’s salary.

Loved Blue Thunder in the theater as a kid. Haven't seen it since, but it sure worked then as a high-tech thriller with a Nightcrawler/Collateral look.

Also, Easy Money, in which Rodney Dangerfield and Joe Pesci eventually invent high-end streetwear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T7kklmGWLDk

omigod I cackled at the sight gag at 0:35

This list is pretty much my earliest memories of cable TV. I saw the third Jaws and Superman films before I ever watched the originals.

Going with Vacation over A Christmas Story.

Spring Break is the only title here that means nothing at all to me.

A very mildly amusing T&A comedy from the guy who did Friday the 13th.

what the hell is High Road to China?

Tom Selleck and Bess Armstrong in old time clothes flying planes. We watched it opening night b/c my mom was/is a massive Selleckhead.

...so a fake Indy Jones?

well, Selleck did read for the Indy part.

His mustache read for Marcus Brody

Lotta oof here. Let's see ...

Number of these I have seen: 9
Number of these I saw in the theatre: 4 (including "Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone," in 3-D)
Number of these I would see again: probably 0, but I was just thinking about "Blue Thunder" just last week!

I forgot Dennis Quaid's in Jaws 3D...and the quite busy Bess Armstrong!

The You Must Remember This ep on Flashdance is terrific.

i forget if Sudden Impact is any good. i definitely saw it way back in the '90s.

i'm voting Jedi, obviously it's imperfect but compared to the recent SW fare (Rogue One/Andor aside), it's 2001.

though the best space movie of '83 is the mystifyingly unsuccessful The Right Stuff.

Sudden Impact is, famously/infamously, the Dirty Harry movie that introduced the "go ahead, make my day" line, which is sort of a Mandela Effect thing, since I think a lot of people assume it's in the first one (which has the "do you feel lucky, punk" line/exchange).

All the 3-D revival sequels were dogshit. Amityville 3, Jaws 3, Friday the 13th ... blarf. I recall Spacehunter being terrible as well, plus some 1983 Indiana Jones rip off called ... Treasure of the Four Crowns? Which I also saw in the theatre, and which apparently features a score by Ennio Morricone?!

Ooh, the other shitty 1983 3-D sci-fi (not) spectacular I saw was "Metalstorm: The Destruction of Jared-Syn."

This was the film that kickstarted the second wave 3D boom:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comin%27_at_Ya!

Lol

Anthony admitted the film was not Citizen Kane in terms of quality. "You wouldn't make Citizen Kane' in 3-D", he said.

AFAIK, and other UKians can correct me here, A Christmas Story never really happened over here which is fine cos I don't need to weigh it against Chevy having a meltdown in the Wally World car park

I was at prime blockbuster movie age here — 13 to 14 — but saw (and still have seen) very few of these. Terms of Endearment was obviously Not For Me at the time, and I have never circled back around to it. I kind of have to go with Jedi, if only because I got out of school early with three or four of my 8th-grade friends and rode our bikes about 12 miles to get in a two-hour line to see it on opening day. I actually remember the bike ride adventure more than the movie, but it's all of a piece.

This was the film that kickstarted the second wave 3D boom

Speak of the wiki devil:

The same filmmakers returned in 1983 with Treasure of the Four Crowns

Easy Money is where Anthrax sampled all the Taylor Negron dialogue for "I'm the Man"

I'M THE MAN, I'M SO BAD I SHOULD BE IN DETENTION

I saw Spacehunter in the theater with the glasses.. I remember the 3D being pretty decent

My first Molly Ringwald film, though I didn't know it at the time

In Superman III's mild defense: Christopher Reeve was never hotter than as Bad Drunk Superman.

Unfortunately, I think that was Superman II

I'm voting for Vacation, but I 1983 me would've voted for Jedi.

Bad Drunk Superman was not in S2.

Saw in theaters (my parents were divorced, my dad took us to a lot of movies on the weekends): Lone Wolf McQuade, Return of the Jedi, Sudden Impact (also Jaws 3-D)
Saw on video or cable: National Lampoon's Vacation, Blue Thunder, The Big Chill, Flashdance (not until like 1989, I was at a girl's house and she put it on)

I might actually vote for Lone Wolf McQuade. It's not the best Chuck Norris movie, but there's a scene in it where they bury him and his truck in a pit and he drives the truck out from beneath the earth, which at 11 was pretty amazing.

at 11 was pretty amazing

See also: Chuck Norris in general, with diminishing returns after that.

I think the only ones I saw in the theater were Return of the Jedi and Superman III. The one I've seen the most is A Christmas Story.

See also: Chuck Norris in general, with diminishing returns after that.

Pretty much, yeah. His best movie, Code Of Silence, came out in 1985 and it's been all downhill since.

Anyone watched Deal of the Century?

Deal of the Century is a 1983 American comedy film directed by William Friedkin and starring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines, and Sigourney Weaver.

The film follows the adventures of several arms dealers that compete to sell weapons to a South American dictator.

His High Reagan Era films are xenophobic nightmares.

The one I've seen the most is A Christmas Story

yeah, outside of maybe Jedi (as part of a larger mythos), this movie probably has the longest shelf-life of the lot

His Everyone's High Reagan Era films are xenophobic nightmares.

The only thing I remember about Blue Thunder is watching it at a friend's house with his dad, and there is a scene of gratuitous nudity where the guys in the 'copter are looking at some woman undressing through a window on an upper floor of a high-rise apartment building and one of them says "Look at that tan, boys" and my friend's dad said "Don't look at that tan, boys".

Unless that was Airwolf.

Nope, that was Blue Thunder, almost a proto-Body Double moment.

Also starring Daniel Stern, fresh off Diner.

I totally remember that creepo scene from Blue Thunder, hovering outside a woman's window

It was set in the future: the 1984 Summer Olympics in LA

Deal of the Century is crap. Not even an interesting failure.

I watched Big Chill a couple years back and thought it held up well... but those 80s dramas are one of my favorite periods in American cinema: Kramer vs Kramer, Ordinary People, On Golden Pond, etc.
I think it's because it was right around my parents divorce and my dad got cable and HBO when he moved into town, and HBO didn't really play all that many movies so you could watch something more than once, especially during summer break

(oh also My Bodyguard)

Deal of the Century is a 1983 American comedy film directed by William Friedkin and starring Chevy Chase, Gregory Hines, and Sigourney Weaver.

For a second there I confused Deal of the Century with the Best Defense. I was, like, Chase, Hines and Weaver? Don't you mean Dudley Moore, Eddie Murphy and Kate Capshaw?

grim list, Jedi

randomly picked list of '83 films that were not #1:

=the high brow=
Tender Mercies
Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence
Zelig
Silkwood
Never Cry Wolf

=the low brow=
Brainstorm
The Outsiders
Rumble Fish
Something Wicked This Way Comes
The Hunger
WarGames
Twilight Zone: The Movie
Never Cry Wolf
Risky Business
Testament (same year as 'The Day After')

(I had no recollection that both The Outsiders & Rumblefish were released the same year!!)

I've never seen Rumble Fish or The Outsiders, but now I kinda want to. It's the only Coppola movie in the Criterion Collection.

Outsiders is mostly working class kitchen sink, Rumble Fish has some.. uh, trippy elements
Both are great, but I prefer the Outsiders; it was super important to us as kids

The '83 movie I was surprised not to see on the list (and would have voted for it if it was) is Trading Places. Which was a big hit, but on checking, it was blocked from #1 by the long run of Jedi.

Also I loved Risky Business — again, I was 13-14, it was sexy etc. I haven't seen it in years, I don't know how it would seem now. And Something Wicked This Way Comes is somewhat slept on, watched that sometime in the last 10 years with my kids, it is an effective adaptation that gets the Bradbury tone right.

For me it's A Christmas Story by a mile. Kinda want to watch Superman III for the laughs though.

Risky Business holds up. Feels like Michael Mann doing a John Hughes movie.

Hollywood was in serious decline by 1983. They're not all bad - e.g. Terms of Endearment and A Christmas Story - but it's not unlike now where there's a stark contrast between what the big studios are pouring their money into and what's being made elsewhere. (Risky Business is very good though, I would've voted for that.)

Looking over my other favorites realeased that year, I see only one that was a Hollywood studio production:

L'argent [Robert Bresson]
Sans Soleil [Chris Marker]
Videodrome [David Cronenberg]
My Brother’s Wedding [Charles Burnett]
The King of Comedy [Martin Scorsese]
Bless Their Little Hearts [Billy Woodberry]
Local Hero [Bill Forsyth]
Pauline à la plage [Eric Rohmer]

I'll also add that the Joe Dante and George Miller segments of the Twilight Zone movie are really good, but they don't make up for the other two.

I haven't seen it in years

Yeah, "Risky Business" is a masterpiece, like Michael Mann doing a teen sex comedy. It looks incredible, it's got a Tangerine Dream score, it's set in Chicago, etc. And the script is a cynical indictment of capitalism, especially the original/alternate ending.

The Right Stuff (Philip Kaufman)
L’Argent (Robert Bresson)
Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)
Rumblefish (Francis Ford Coppola)
Pauline at the Beach (Eric Rohmer)
Local Hero (Bill Forsythe)
Videodrome (David Cronenberg)
Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode)
The Ballad of Narayama (Shohei Imamura)
A Christmas Story (Bob Clark)

My top ten

Jedi over Christmas Story. I still need to come to Terms tho.

You'll lightsaber your eye out

Hollywood was in serious decline by 1983. They're not all bad - e.g. Terms of Endearment and A Christmas Story - but it's not unlike now where there's a stark contrast between what the big studios are pouring their money into and what's being made elsewhere.

For contrast, the top 10 movies of 1983 were:

1. Return of the Jedi
2. Terms of Endearment
3. Flashdance
4. Trading Places
5. WarGames
6. Octopussy
7. Sudden Impact
8. Staying Alive
9. Mr. Mom
10. Risky Business

The Top 10 of 2025 were:

1. A Minecraft Movie
2. Lilo & Stitch
3. Superman
4. Jurassic World Rebirth
5. Zootopia 2
6. Wicked: For Good
7. Sinners
8. The Fantastic Four: First Steps
9. How to Train Your Dragon
10. Avatar: Fire and Ash

So, 4 sequels/franchise flicks in the '83 top ten vs 1 non-sequel/franchise flick in '25. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about most of the former list--I like WarGames and Risky Business quite a bit--but it strikes me that it was a lot easier and more enjoyable to just go out and see a movie in 1983 than it is today, where most of these films seem like they are attached to pre-existing fandoms to one degree or another. Put another way, I've seen all but one of the '83 list (Staying Alive), while I can't imagine ever wanting to watch all but one of the '25 list (yeah, I still haven't seen Sinners). A completely subjective analysis, of course, but I think it does speak to how the Hollywood of 1983 still mostly operated according to old school studio system-based values, comparable to the Golden Age in all but (arguably, but not really) quality. To bird's point, the domination of Return of the Jedi (which grossed $309 million, to 2nd place finisher Terms of Endearment's $108 million), Hollywood '83 was probably the nascent version of the beast it is today, but it still feels like a different animal, to me.

*WITH the domination

Oh yeah, I won't argue with those specifics, I was just talking broadly in terms of quality. (For example, while it's nice that there are less sequels, "original" junk is still junk.)

xp Fanny and Alexander (Ingmar Bergman)

One of my favorites too - I had it down for 1982, but it was belatedly released in the U.S. (albeit in much shorter form) in 1983.

less sequels in 1983 that is

I don't generally like documentaries, but Chris Marker's Sans Soleil (1983) is a pretty amazing quasi-documentary film about life in Guinea-Bissau and Japan, interspersed with the fantasy of a woman narrator reading letters sent to her from a fictitious cameraman.

Among many other things, Marker shows takenoko-zoku, a youth subculture cult in early 1980s Japan that gathered in the pedestrianized streets of Harajuku to dance together

I’ve seen next to none of these, but love Jedi and Terms and Christmas Story.

Rumble Fish is wonderful. Some very bizarre fight choreography, an amazing amazing soundtrack by a policeman who isn’t Sting, and Mickey Rourke is really all that. I’d watch it again any time

Wow, I haven’t seen The Big Chill

grim list, Jedi

― Cod:Shellfish (emsworth)

Looking at that Top 10 box office for 1983 that Cryptosicko posted, you really get only a hint through Flashdance and Risky Business how much MTV/music videos are about to play a role in American films and their marketing and/or reaching the public consciousness. In the Top 10 films for 1984, you’ll see Footloose (number 7 for the year) and Purple Rain (10), which probably couldn’t exist without music video-style editing and production techniques being familiar to the masses, and then you have Ghostbusters (1), Beverley Hills Cop (5), and Romancing The Stone (8) all having hit songs, and which led to all five of these 1984 movies having music videos featuring clips from their films playing constantly.

Romancing The Stone

Are you thinking of the sequel? Isn't that the one with the Billy Ocean hit?

For reasons lost to time, I was a huge Eddy Grant fan as a child, so his song probably seemed like a bigger hit to me than it actually was. The official video has no footage of the film, though, so I probably just misremembered it containing footage based on the 10 seconds it appears in the film when I re-watched the Douglas/Turner/Devito trilogy last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gngSqOQ_wDg

Why wasn't Tootsie included in the poll? Clicking through to the wiki link, I see it was #1 for the first nine weeks of the year.

Poll is only 1983 releases?

iirc correctly Eddy Grant wrote the song for the movie but it was rejected, so he just released it anyway? Something like that. Pretty good tune imo for having to work with such an awkward title.

the average runtime of the 1983 top 10 is 112 minutes. the average runtime of the 2025 top 10 is 130 minutes. as dire as the 1983 list is, at least Mr. Mom would have you back out on the sidewalk in 90 minutes flat.

Annoyingly the Wikipedia #1 box-office lists only start at 1985 for the UK. But for comparison here's a list of the top grossing UK films for 1983. I marked 1983 releases with asterisks, be aware that release dates could be different between UK/US. Deal of the Century nowhere in sight!

Star Wars: Return of the Jedi*
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
Octopussy*
Gandhi*
An Officer and a Gentleman*
Never Say Never Again*
Superman III*
Tootsie*
National Lampoon's Vacation*
The Dark Crystal
The Jungle Book
Staying Alive*
WarGames*
Airplane! II: The Sequel
Flashdance*
Trading Places*
Educating Rita*
Blue Thunder*
Monty Python's The Meaning of Life*
Sophie's Choice

1985 UK #1s list includes such delights as The Prodigal, The Witch, Johnny Dangerously, Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment, Return to Oz and Best Defense, so I'm sure 1983 had many similar flash in the pans.

John Hughes as the screenwriter of two box office hits revolving around adult males (Vacation and Mr. Mom) is an interesting time capsule when you consider his reputation as a filmmaker after 1984.

Apparently, Deal of the Century ended up being the 75th highest grossing film of 1983 in the US:

Domestic Box Office For 1983

ie. nowhere in sight in the US also, despite that week at #1.

Yeah so much of the "#1" lists just depends on what week they were released. The U.S. #1's so far this year are Avatar: Fire and Ash, Mercy, and Send Help. At least two of those will elicit "wait, what was that?" from people 40 years from now.

WmC: List of 1982 box office number-one films in the United States

I was going to say that A Christmas Story never got a UK cinema release, but in fact it did, nearly a year after the US release. Certainly didn't make any kind of impression in the UK at the time, and even now it's not really a Christmas telly staple like Miracle on 34th Street or It's a Wonderful Life. Deal of the Century definitely didn't get a UK cinema release, although there was a VHS rental tape of it.

Some substantial portion of Christmas Story's appeal, at least based on my parents' reaction to it, was in recreating the sights and sounds of the late 1940s/early 1950s in certain slices of US society. Whatever its other charms, I wouldn't be surprised if that stuff doesn't travel well.

needs a soundtracks poll

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.