Best! Summer! Blockbuster! Ever! (That Was Released This Week): ‘Jurassic Park”

Is creating a three-way tie for for sixth place fair? No, it’s not. But when the stars, or at least Hollywood release schedules, align like this how can you choose just one? (See below for another instance of multiple classics being released on the same day.) It now seems remarkable that both Gremlins and Ghostbusters, horror/comedy hybrids that became two of the most beloved films of the ‘80s were released on the same day in June. It’s not like one is counter-programming for the other. Gremlins, Joe Dante’s affectionate monster movie send-up leans harder on the horror. Ghostbusters, leans in the other direction; with a cast that includes Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, and Harold Ramis, how could it not? But the Venn overlap between people who enjoy Gremlins and those who enjoy Ghostbusters is pretty much a circle. (Even if fans of Gremlins haven’t picked up the toxic stink of Ghostbusters fans in recent years.) Both became hits, but something had to give somewhere.

Hence the underperformance of the best team made by the Airplane! and Naked Gun team of David Zucker, Jim Abrhams, and Jerry Zucker, a parody of spy movies, Elvis movies, Cold War tensions and basically everything else that crossed the team’s mind starring Val Kilmer. (Though in time it also became a cult hit.)

Where to stream Gremlins

Where to stream Ghostbusters

Where to stream Top Secret!

Directed by Tobe Hooper but bearing the heavy imprint of writer and producer Steven Spielberg, Poltergeist offers a chilling counterpoint to the twinkly suburban visions found in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (released just one week later the same summer). Here every element of suburban existence becomes an object of horror, from television to toys to the trees to, ultimately, the land itself. No wonder it made a whole generation of kids fear looking under the bed. Who knows what might be in even the safest of spaces?

Where to stream Poltergeist

An ingenious premise — a terrorist wires a bus with a bomb that will detonate if its speed dips below 50 mph — flawlessly executed, Speed helped make a star of Sandra Bullock and to remind viewers why we loved Keanu Reeves. (It’s a weird quirk of Reeves’ career, even back in these early days, that he has a way of falling out of fashion every few years then returning more popular than ever.) Cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Boot would never be this good again, but his debut remains an undeniable classic.

Where to stream Speed

Remember that comment about auspicious dates above? June 4, 1982 was another. Those not too shaken by Poltergeist could turn it into a double feature with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Directed by, it rescued the Star Trek film franchise after the tepidly received (and just plain tepid) Star Trek: The Motion Picture by using its world and cast in service of a fast-paced, thematically rich action film. It’s quietly one of the most influential films of the past few decades. Alongside the follow-ups to Jaws, Rocky, and Star Wars, it helped establish that sequels could be bigger business and that series could just go on and on and on if guided by the right hands and that new life could often be found in old properties.

Where to stream Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

By the early ‘00s, the sequel model was well in place and films like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone arrived as part of a plan to roll out future installments down the line. But what if the first movies were just OK? How do you stoke enthusiasm for future entries? For the Harry Potter films the answer was to bring in Alfonso Cuarón, already established as one of the great directors even if some of his best films lay ahead of him, to give the third entry depth and artistry where the preceding entries had merely been solidly crafted (and smartly cast) adaptations of J.K. Rowling’s books. Cuarón never returned to the series, but his influence hangs heavy over subsequent entries, with their darker palette and their more emotionally complex approach.

Where to stream Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

There are only a handful of blockbusters that completely changed the summer movie game, and Jurassic Park is among that elite few. Summer movies that combine heady ideas — cloning ethics! chaos theory! — with stunning action scenes and groundbreaking special effects don’t come around all that often, or get handled as well as Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of a Michael Crichton novel about a theme park filled with cloned dinosaurs. What could go wrong?

Plenty, as it turns out, but the film makes watching the breakdown of order work both as a visceral thriller and an intellectual exercise about the hubris of trying to bend nature to our will. All that plus dinosaurs, big, wondrous, mostly scary, dinosaurs created in large part by CGI effects that had never been used this extensively, or this effectively. Special effects never looked back. And sometimes they rushed ahead too far by depending on CGI that lacked the punch of practical effects. But in Spielberg’s hands, Jurassic Park pointed toward blockbusters’ future (via creatures from the prehistoric past).

Where to stream Jurassic Park

The degree to which Spielberg, not Tobe Hooper, shaped Poltergeist has been a controversial topic since the film’s release. But Hooper wasn’t just some hired gun and the list of his memorable films extends well beyond The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Among them: this creepy, relatively low-budget remake of a ’50s science fiction classic in which a bunch of kids see their small town transformed by extraterrestrial visitors.

Where to stream Invaders from Mars

Another Spielberg-produced film with cultural staying power, The Goonies has delighted younger viewers for years. But here’s the thing: Have you tried watching it as a grown-up? It’s a nightmare of screaming kids and forced whimsy. As a My-First-’80s-Blockbuster it works well enough, but beware repeat visits to Astoria.

Keith Phipps writes about movies and other aspects of pop culture. You can find his work in such publications as The Ringer, Slate, Vulture, and Polygon. Keith also co-hosts the podcasts The Next Picture Show and Random Movie Night and lives in Chicago with his wife and child. Follow him on Twitter at @kphipps3000.

Where to stream The Goonies