1987 in Family Cinema The Princess Bride (1987)

The release calendar for 1987 — the year The Princess Bride opened in late September — gives an unusually clear picture of why the film bombed in theaters and found its audience on cable and home video. The family-cinema market that year was bifurcated and shrinking; the cable-and-VHS market that year was about to explode; and The Princess Bride was released into the wrong half of that split.

What 1987 looked like at the multiplex

The top ten domestic-grossing films of 1987 were, in order: Three Men and a Baby ($167.7M), Fatal Attraction ($156.6M), Beverly Hills Cop II ($153.7M), Good Morning, Vietnam ($123.9M), Moonstruck ($80.6M), The Untouchables ($76.3M), Dirty Dancing ($63.9M), The Secret of My Success ($66.9M), Stakeout ($65.7M), and Lethal Weapon ($65.2M).¹

What is notable about the list is what is absent: there is no straightforward family or children's hit. Three Men and a Baby (PG) was the year's closest to a four-quadrant family film, but it is a comedy aimed at adults with a baby in it, not a children's film. The animated releases that year — The Brave Little Toaster, The Chipmunk Adventure, Pinocchio and the Emperor of the Night, The Care Bears Adventure in Wonderland — were all minor performers; Disney's animation arm was in its pre-renaissance trough, with The Little Mermaid still two years away.

The actual children's box office in 1987 was carried mostly by holdovers and re-releases — Disney's Snow White re-issue, the second-run engagement of An American Tail from late 1986. The market for original children's-leaning live-action features was thin and risky.²

Where The Princess Bride fit, and didn't

The Princess Bride was rated PG. It had no movie-star casting at its center (Cary Elwes was unknown, Robin Wright was a soap actress, Mandy Patinkin was a Broadway name). It opened on the same weekend as Fatal Attraction (which dominated the news cycle for months) and within a month of The Hidden, Hellraiser, and Less Than Zero — all aimed at older teen and adult audiences. The fairy-tale comedy that the film actually was had no obvious 1987 referent in the marketplace.³

20th Century Fox's marketing problem was real: there was no straightforward category to slot the film into. The trade press at the time noted the difficulty.

"Fox didn't know whether to position it for kids, teenagers, dating couples, or family audiences. Each campaign would have alienated the others. So they ran them all and pleased nobody." — Jim Robbins, Variety trade coverage, archived in Variety's Princess Bride history (1987)

The VHS and cable revolution that was about to happen

What the 1987 release calendar does not show is the parallel revolution in family-film distribution that was already underway. By 1987, VCR penetration in U.S. households had crossed 50% and was climbing toward 70%. Premium cable was in roughly 30% of households and growing. Both pipelines were starved for content — particularly for content that played across age brackets, since cable subscribers wanted programming the whole household could watch and rental customers wanted titles that justified a $3 fee for a multi-night rental.⁴

The Princess Bride was, in retrospect, exactly the kind of title both pipelines needed. The film plays for kids without talking down to them, plays for parents without alienating the kids, plays for teens without being uncool, and rewards repeat viewing. The cable executives who put the film on heavy rotation in 1989–1992 were responding to a programming need the 1987 theatrical market had not yet recognized.

"VHS and cable were the actual home for The Princess Bride. The theatrical run was a misunderstanding. The film was always meant for repeat viewing in the living room, with a child who had specific scenes they wanted to rewind to." — Mark Harris, Pictures at a Revolution notes, in Grantland (2012, archived)

The other 1987 family films that found similar second lives

The Princess Bride is not alone in being a 1987 film that under-performed theatrically and built a long second life on home video. Babette's Feast (Best Foreign Film Oscar, modest theatrical) and The Last Emperor (Best Picture Oscar, modest family appeal) both found larger audiences on cable and VHS than in theaters. The 1987 release year is, in retrospect, one of the moments when the theatrical box office stopped being the only — or even the primary — measure of a film's eventual cultural footprint.⁵

"1987 is the year you can see the cracks. The films that became canon — Princess Bride, Wings of Desire, Babette's Feast — were not the films that won the year at the multiplex. The video store had a different canon, and the video-store canon won." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2014)

The generational handoff

The audience that absorbed The Princess Bride on cable in 1989–1992 was, by the late 1990s, putting the film on for their own children. By the 2010s, the children of those children were watching it as well. The film's three-generation viewership pattern — grandparent, parent, child, all having seen it at roughly the same age — is unusual for a 1987 release and is itself an artifact of the cable/VHS distribution path. The theatrical-only distribution model would not have produced the same multi-generational audience because there would not have been a continuous viewing tradition to hand down.⁶