Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan opened June 4, 1982 in 1,621 theaters and pulled in $14,347,221 over its first weekend — the largest opening weekend gross in box-office history at that moment. It cost a modest $12 million against the first film’s bloated $44 million, finished its run at $97 million worldwide, and…
Mötley Crüe spent the 1980s turning a Hollywood apartment and a residency at the Starwood into the most dangerous act in rock. Between 1981 and 1989 they released four albums — Too Fast for Love, Shout at the Devil, Theatre of Pain, and Dr. Feelgood — survived a fatal car crash, a heroin overdose that…
The Nightmare Before Christmas opened in limited release on October 13, 1993, four days after its premiere at the New York Film Festival and more than two weeks before its wide release on October 29. Disney distributed the stop-motion film through its Touchstone Pictures label instead of its own name, worried the gothic visuals —…
Above the Rim is a 1994 basketball drama starring Tupac Shakur as a Harlem drug dealer named Birdie who tries to pull a gifted high school point guard into his orbit. The film made just $16.1 million at the box office and got mixed reviews, but its Death Row Records soundtrack — anchored by Warren…
John Denver died on October 12, 1997, when the experimental Rutan Long-EZ aircraft he was flying ran out of fuel and crashed into Monterey Bay near Pacific Grove, California. He was 53 and had owned the plane only a few weeks. The NTSB later traced the crash to a fuel valve that had been relocated…
Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley co-founded KISS in 1973 and have co-owned the band’s name equally ever since, with neither able to outvote the other. Stanley has been the group’s primary songwriter and frontman, while Simmons built KISS into a licensing empire — a division of labor that has produced genuine admiration, public insults, and…
On October 10, 1985, Hollywood lost two giants within hours of each other. Orson Welles, director of Citizen Kane, died of a heart attack at his Los Angeles home at age 70, just hours after taping his final television interview. Yul Brynner, the Oscar-winning star of The King and I, died that same day in…
The Phantom of the Opera officially opened at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on October 9, 1986, after two weeks of previews. Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical starred Michael Crawford as the Phantom and Sarah Brightman as Christine Daaé, was directed by Harold Prince, and went on to become the longest-running show in Broadway history before…
The Rolling Stones released four studio albums in the 1980s — Tattoo You (1981), Undercover (1983), Dirty Work (1986), and Steel Wheels (1989) — while Mick Jagger and Keith Richards spent three of those years barely speaking to each other. Tattoo You is the decade’s high point, built mostly from 1970s outtakes; Dirty Work is…
Craig Jones never asked for this life. All he wanted was a quiet Christmas with his family — and instead he got robbed by a man in a Santa suit, forced into a rent-a-cop uniform, and dragged into the strangest holiday heist comedy the hood ever produced. Friday After Next, released November 22, 2002, closed…
Few bands defined the contradictions of the 1980s quite like KISS. They entered the decade as the self-proclaimed “hottest band in the world” — a pyrotechnic circus act in greasepaint and platform boots who had sold out stadiums across the globe. Then the decade got weird. The makeup came off. The hair got bigger, chasing…
Some albums don’t just arrive — they detonate. When Guns N’ Roses dropped Appetite for Destruction on July 21, 1987, nobody in the music industry knew what they were dealing with. Radio programmers passed. MTV refused. Geffen Records briefly considered abandoning the whole project. What happened next is one of the greatest slow-burn success stories…
