It’s worth understanding just how different the moviegoing landscape was in 1984. For one, there were far fewer theaters in the U.S., with somewhere between 18,000 and 21,000 screens across the country at that time. Remarkably, there were roughly ten times that many screens in the Soviet Union. That number is now closer to 40,000 in the U.S. The box office was also far more dependent on domestic ticket sales at that time. This was decades before Hollywood would come to depend on making sure blockbusters could play in China.

The moviegoing experience itself was also different. There were no streaming services and cable was a nascent idea. The now mostly-defunct Blockbuster Video didn’t even arrive on the scene until 1985. This is to say if you wanted to see a movie, that generally happened at a theater. As for the theaters themselves? It depends on who you ask and where you lived.

“Theatres used to feel like a slightly divey bar,” reads a comment on a Reddit thread about moviegoing in the ’80s and ’90s posted by someone under the username folstar. “You’d go there and hang around and sure it kinda sucked, but you were there, man. The people were there.” On that same thread, 69ubermensch69 pointed out that “In the ’80s there were ashtrays in the seats.” Over on a different Reddit thread on a similar topic, user Kedosto waxed poetically about the theatrical experience of the time.

“The theater from my youth was a grand, elegant structure. It was luxurious, with lots of stained wood finishes and beautiful fabrics and carpet. The screen was behind a majestic wall of curtains which opened in a slow, regal manner. Going to the movie theater was a special event.”

This is to say, be it the dive bar treatment or the special event experience, theaters were a more essential part of day-to-day life for the average person. That is crucial in looking at what happened with these two movies in their day.