Hollywood is running out of hit ’80s movies to reboot

Hollywood is running out of blockbuster films from the 1980s to remake or reboot, after a string of movies celebrating the era of big hair, shoulder pads and Ronald Reagan.

Of the top 15 highest-grossing films of that decade, just three to date have not been given a sequel or prequel or turned into a franchise: “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial,” “Tootsie” and “Rain Man.”

“It’s funny, because for a long time the ’80s was such a maligned era, but now it’s cool,” said ComScore media analyst Paul Dergarabedian. “ It’s almost like — for Hollywood — the ’80s are the new ’50s or ’60s.”

In the summer of 1986, the Hollywood box office belonged to Tom Cruise and “Top Gun.”

The film, cementing the stardom of then-24-year-old Cruise, soared to $176.8 million domestically for the Viacom Inc. VIAB, +0.60% unit Paramount Pictures, outpacing “The Karate Kid Part II,” “Aliens,” “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and “Stand by Me.”

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Earlier this week, while promoting his new film, “The Mummy,” out June 9, Cruise confirmed on an Australian TV show that the highest-grossing film of 1986 is getting a sequel. “Top Gun 2,” Cruise said, is expected to begin filming next year.

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“Top Gun” would become just the most recent instance of a Hollywood studio cracking open the vault in hopes of wringing further profit from storied, classic or nostalgic content. This weekend Paramount is releasing to cinemas a small-screen ’80s staple with its film adaptation of “Baywatch,” starring Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron. In October Time Warner Inc.–owned TWX, +0.10% Warner Bros. will usher the highly anticipated “Blade Runner 2049” into theaters.

And Walt Disney Co. DIS, +1.06% is all-in on nostalgia and has carved out a section in its film slate through 2021 for live-action remakes of its animated classics.

Even TV has been bitten by the nostalgia bug. ABC recently announced it’s rebooting “Roseanne,” and the network aired a musical remake of 1987’s “Dirty Dancing,” to which Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. LGF.A, +8.65% gave a sequel in 2004. That film, “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights,” brought in $27.7 million on a $25 million production budget.

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“Let’s just call it for what it is,” said Dergarabedian. “Some of these movies are updated solely to capitalize on how popular they were, and the quality isn’t always there, and that’s where you get into trouble.”

In March, the Warner Bros. big-screen adaptation of the buddy-cop TV show “ChiPs” from the late ’70s and early ’80s struggled to recoup expenses. The film has brought in $25.5 million worldwide to date, having carried a $25 million production budget, not including prints and marketing.

Hollywood has received a great deal of flak for occasionally appearing devoid of original ideas. Last year, franchise fatigue and sequelitis gripped the industry, giving way to headlines such as “The summer of our discontent: When franchise overload killed movie originality” and “Why Hollywood hasn’t learned anything from a miserable summer of box-office bombs.”

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The birth and rise of the modern blockbuster, which drives business in Hollywood today, is credited to the success of Steven Spielberg’s “Jaws” in 1975. In 1978, Universal Pictures, now under the Comcast Corp. CMCSA, +1.41% umbrella, sought to capitalize on the same magic with “Jaws 2.” this time without Steven Spielberg at the helm. As the industry moved into the ’80s it began perfecting the blockbuster science, seeking to create the event cinema of “Star Wars,” “Indiana Jones” and “E.T.”

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“Following this model, Hollywood continued to search, with demographic research and a ‘bottom-line mentality,’ for the one large ‘event film’ that everyone had to see,” wrote Tim Dirks, editor of AMC’s Filmsite.org.

“Most big-screen event movies, scheduled to be released at advantageous times — at summer and Christmas time — would take expensive fortunes to produce, but hey promised potentially lucrative payoffs,” Dirks wrote. “In retrospect, many of the blockbusters in the ’80s ... were well-constructed films with strong characters and plots not entirely built upon their special effects.”