List of 1986 box office number-one films in the United States

This place is not a place of honor... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us.

had to vote with my childhood heart, Back to School

The Fly in a walk, without hesitation.

I hate Aliens so much.

It's crazy that Iron Eagle and Top Gun came out the same year, because Iron Eagle absolutely feels like the kind of shitty knockoff some studio would have cranked out as fast as possible in the wake of Top Gun's success. Doesn't feel at all like a "once upon a time there were two magician movies" when it absolutely is.

I had the same thought about Iron Eagle

The Fly is my choice too, no hesitation: such a rich text that also functions as an effective horror film. And it's not even two hours long!

it's crazy that Iron Eagle came out months before Top Gun. My memory is it wasn't actually truly terrible (keep in mind I saw it when I was 12), and obv Top Gun really just isn't good enough to be demonstrably better.

I went with ALIENS, I know why people don't like it, but it's one of those i could put on at any time and watch the whole thing.

The Fly, easily. Top Gun is my least favourite 80s movie.

Aliens is easily my #2, understand why people might dislike it, and I think they're barking mad: the only effective megabudget Cameron shoot-'em-up. Sigourney Weaver's Best Actress Oscar nomination is one of the great wtf's of my lifetime.

i think Aliens is a really smart movie with a few (intentionally) dumb characters, and structurally it's the best example of Cameron's gift for story construction.

ugh another bad year... I got no dog in this fight

the only effective megabudget Cameron shoot-'em-up

stop

The Fly easy.

But I will admit "I-I-I-I want the knife" and "Say it! SAY IT!" made a lasting impression despite coming from terrible movies. (Also it's bewildering how the latter got Kurt Vonnegut to make a cameo.)

Otherwise, 1986 still saw some great films in the arthouses and overseas:

The Horse Thief [Tian Zhuangzhuang]
Blue Velvet [David Lynch]
Mammame [Raúl Ruiz]
The Cup And The Lip [Warren Sonbert]
Down By Law [Jim Jarmusch]
Mauvais Sang [Léos Carax]
Mélo [Alain Resnais]
Le Rayon vert [Eric Rohmer]
Mala Noche [Gus Van Sant]
Grandeur et décadence d'un petit commerce de cinéma [Jean-Luc Godard]

also... Platoon? Ferris Bueller

xp and The Sacrifice by Tarkovsky

I was on something when I saw it, but Down and Out in Beverly Hills seemed delightfully funny at the time

Didn't realize Aliens has its detractors, thought it was universally liked.

I should revisit The Sacrifice - the famous opening and closing shots alone are incredible, and I thought it was better than its predecessor, Nostalghia, but as a whole it fell short of my favorite Tarkovsky films. That was a long time ago though, I may feel different about it now.

Platoon is probably the Oliver Stone film I like "best" - it's not a bad film, but I still have reservations about. I do remember a social studies teacher telling our class it did a better job of depicting combat in Vietnam than any other Hollywood movie he's ever seen. (He was a Vietnam vet himself and was in combat.)

FWIW, I think Dave Kehr was an enthusiastic supporter of Aliens and thought it was far better than Ridley Scott's Alien (which he didn't like).

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild was one of the highlights of this year.

Paul Reiser was a trailblazer in having a comedian play the bad guy.

_the only effective megabudget Cameron shoot-'em-up_

stop

how soon we forget all the gunplay in Titanic

Probably the best: Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer

My people, comment on THESE movies, not the Tarkovsky film that made $100 million worldwide

Also remembering enjoying The Mosquito Coast, great casting, but who knows how it holds up

Sorry Alfred, Lord Sotosyn

stop

― Wichita Referee's Assistant (darraghmac), Thursday, October 15, 2026 7:09 PM (fifty-six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Cameron ended as a shoot-'em-up director after 1991. True Lies is grotesque shite.

The Sacrifice made $100 million?

lol

in rubles

Something Wild (Jonathan Demme)
Aliens (James Cameron)
The Fly (David Cronenberg)
The Green Ray (Eric Rohmer)
She's Gotta Have It (Spike Lee)
Mona Lisa (Neil Jordan)
Sid and Nancy (Alex Cox)
Hannah and Her Sisters (Woody Allen)
My Beautiful Laundrette (Stephen Frears)
Blue Velvet (David Lynch)

River's Edge is probably the '86 film that made the biggest impression on me at the time

Didn't realize Aliens has its detractors, thought it was universally liked.

I have always believed mine to be a minority opinion. Basically, I hate Aliens because Alien was a perfect horror movie that didn't need a sequel, and definitely didn't need that sequel to be a brainless (if occasionally funny), none-more-'80s action shoot-'em-up.

I guess I'm misremembering, because in my mind River's Edge is a 1987 movie.

Amazing soundtrack, though I wish it included the two Hank Ballard songs, which were very well used in the film:

https://www.discogs.com/master/390355-Various-Rivers-Edge

Guess it's an '86 film, but maybe they decided it wasn't necessarily holiday fare?

Release date May 8, 1987

yeah, looks like it was only picked up for distro in '87

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 was also 1986, also funny but unnecessary.

It's fun to read about Short Circuit but can't remember the film at all

The tie-in video for El Debarge's "Who's Johnny" is a masterpiece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HviIFg9ePuY

Jonathan Demme's Something Wild was one of the highlights of this year.

YES, somehow forgot about that one.

Also, forgot that this year (and to a lesser extent Short Circuit) inspired one of my favorite jokes from The Squid and the Whale. (Would link to a clip, but understandably none seems to exist on YouTube.)

I have always believed mine to be a minority opinion. Basically, I hate Aliens because Alien was a perfect horror movie that didn't need a sequel, and definitely didn't need that sequel to be a brainless (if occasionally funny), none-more-'80s action shoot-'em-up.

I don't really like Cameron's films all that much, but IIRC he said a lot of Aliens was inspired by real-life combat experiences in Vietnam. I always thought that was grotesque and reflective of why I kind of detest him as an artist.

This was my high school graduation year and I no longer wanted to see movies about high school like Pretty in Pink or Ferris Bueller, I wanted to see movies about the exciting and scary adult world that was just ahead. So stuff like Blue Velvet and Something Wild or even the relatively slight Modern Girls resonated more. This list of number ones seems kind of heavy on fantasy and silliness and therefore not really what I was vibing with.

I always thought that was grotesque and reflective of why I kind of detest him as an artist.

― birdistheword

I don't think this POV reflects what the film does to show how Weaver's Ripley understands the film

You’re all wrong, Money Pit or gtfo

Have no idea whether Betty Blue holds up. I'm sure it still looks great.

Voted Jo Jo Dancer. Probably would have voted Back To School but I re-watched it and The Money Pit recently, and neither were as funny as they were when I was a child. I’m now tempted to watch The Fly based on how well it’s doing in the comments. I’ve seen the original and the remake is probably the only pre-2000 Cronenberg film I haven’t seen.

Money Pit

Everything else I didn’t see, tolerated at the time but didn’t return to, or have forgotten.

Oh you guys need to watch The Fly, Raymond and Ropy.

Basically, I hate Aliens because Alien was a perfect horror movie that didn't need a sequel, and definitely didn't need that sequel to be a brainless (if occasionally funny), none-more-'80s action shoot-'em-up.

I get it but also thats kind of why it never bugged me, the fact that they didn't try to do "Alien 2" and instead took it in such a different direction from the first one. Its easy for me to forget its even a sequel, they exist in such separate cinematic dimensions

i actually saw Aliens before Alien, and it worked really well without knowing the backstory in full. just relying on what Ripley explained, and the shots of the Nostromo crew on the screen in that meeting, and a few other hints dropped.

But I will admit "I-I-I-I want the knife" and "Say it! SAY IT!" made a lasting impression

lmao yes! I feel like “IIIII want the kniiiife. Pleeease” will still be there when im not sure who my loved ones are

The Fly is really great and is a very rich text but my silly challop/minority opinion is that I just have too much baggage about the post-Cronenberg grad school-ification of horror movies that led to our current era of vacant "elevated horror" slogs that aspire to be rich texts about grief & trauma to stroke your chin over rather than scary horror movie to be scared by.

My dad took my brother and I to see an Aliens/The Fly double feature. It was a big deal for him to take us to see an R-rated movie in the theater, let alone two at once. We were in heaven. But I would probably vote for Pretty in Pink, which is also the one I've watched most recently from this list.

I know it's not a great movie but I love the visuals in Legend. The effects, the costumes, sets, everything is gorgeous. I've seen it the most out of any of these.

Gotta go with The Fly.

I wonder how Golden Child holds up. Probably very badly.

I saw the UK premiere of The Fly at the London Film Festival, Leicester Square with Cronenberg in attendance. Afterwards, the audience were invited over to nearby Canada House on Trafalgar Square for a Q&A with Cronenberg (and plenty of free drink thrown in). Even at the time, it seemed like quite a triumph for the director of Shivers and Rabid to now be so feted and supported by the Canadian establishment.

If we were voting for the one we've seen the most it would be Short Circuit, which seemed to be shown on alternating with DARYL in the early 90s.

As a sign of the times my recollection is that Short Circuit, Top Gun, Cobra, and Aliens were all turned into 8-bit computer games. Aliens was turned into an 8-bit computer game twice! There was a UK version that was a kind of proto-Space Hulk and a US version that was a bunch of minigames. Cobra was the best of them all.

I remember being really disappointed with Top Gun. I didn't see it until the 1990s. It's basically a prototype of the "high 80s" action blockbuster. It's also one of those "the heroes do some training, then go on a mission" films, like Heartbreak Ridge, but it's hard to make jet-age dogfights look exciting. It's just so plain in comparison to the films that came later.

Out of Africa in one of those Oscar bait films that was has no reason to exist outside its year of release, like Terms of Endearment and Driving Miss Daisy.

This was an era when Hollywood wanted to have non-white characters, but wasn't yet prepared to hire non-white actors unless they were types, e.g. the tough drill sergeant or the nerdy computer wiz. Also, I distinctly remember seeing Crocodile Dundee as a kid, and being unmoved by the scene where Linda Kozlowski is attacked by a crocodile while wearing a revealing swimsuit, and then a few years later seeing the same scene again and thinking "blimey, she looks nice". I think I had a similar reaction to the goth version of Mia Sara in Legend, which is otherwise one of those films that sounds great in theory but is just a boring linear slog in reality. With some clever mathematics and access to the Radio Times I could probably date the onset of puberty. I will write about that later.

Surprisingly Jim Jarmusch's Down by Law was not number one at the box office in 1986, or any other year.

I’ve still never seen the two Best Picture nominees on this list.

I bet Sydney Pollack has never watched OOA.

I just watched The Fly and it was really good. I’ve never been a big fan of Jeff Goldblum, but he’s fantastic in this. I was surprised to see it was a Brooksfilm production, and now I like to imagine that Mel Brooks spent his time trying to pull cult directors named David into the mainstream.

However, reading through the IMDB trivia for the film, Stand By Me knocked it out of the number one spot at the box office, but it’s not on this list (it should be between The Fly and Crocodile Dundee on the choices); I don’t know if it’s inclusion would change the discussion and/or eventual results.

Oops!

poll void!

Oh damn this list was already hard enough

The last five minutes of Stand By Me are awful: Richard Dreyfus typing yuppie banalities as his green cursor blinks.

Wikipedia also points out that Rocky IV was number one in the first week of the year. The OP was almost certainly aware of that. I have faith in the OP. This is Ilxor. The participants are of a high quality.

Interestingly Ruthless People and Ferris Bueller's Day Off were among the ten highest-grossing films of 1986 despite never reaching the #1 spot. They were both kept off the top spot by Top Gun and then Karate Kid 2. They actually outgrossed a couple of the #1 films. Ferris has presumably made a lot more money in the years since from television screenings etc.

Platoon was also one of the highest-grossing films to be released in 1986, but it was released in mid-December, so it made most of its money in 1987. It'll be in "list of 1987 box-office number one films in the United Etc", which will have Critical Condition - Richard Pryor and Michael Apted, together and last - and, yes, Ishtar.

Ashley, I didn't include Rocky IV because it's here: List of 1985 box office number-one films in the United States