30 years ago, the first month-plus of the 1995 box office was ruled by something decidedly retro: Legends of the Fall, a holdover from late 1994 that parlayed its January wide release and rising star Brad Pitt into weeks at the number-one slot. Legends was an old-fashioned movie, not just in the attention paid to its young star or the fact that its characters sometimes ride horses, but in its stodgy, landscape-driven family melodrama; it was a movie that was easy enough to picture hitting it big in 1955. After weeks of this turgid nonsense, the American box office was in dire need of an update, of a new movie with a more contemporary sensibility to stroll into town and reinvigorate the culture, but possibly still with horses. Luckily, on February 10th, Sharon Stone arrived, playing a female gunslinger in The Quick and the Dead, a wilder and crazier western than Legends of the Fall, complete with its own up-and-coming stars (Leonardo DiCaprio; Russell Crowe) alongside the well-established Stone and the legendary Gene Hackman.
Then they were all taken down by one Mr. Billy Madison.
Yes, the surprise box office victor, by about $120,000, despite being booked on fewer screens, was Billy Madison, the first real vehicle for Adam Sandler, then still a cast member on Saturday Night Live. (Going Overboard, a low-budget, barely-released project from 1989 that was reissued on home video in the wake of Sandler’s success, doesn’t really count.) Though it wasn’t exactly a smash, the distance between the two films grew further, and Billy Madison’s final gross of $25 million, while shy of, say, Wayne’s World 2 (to say nothing of the original Wayne’s World), would be the equivalent of a little over $50 million in today’s dollars. That would make it the biggest-grossing broad comedy of 2024, albeit in a marketplace where most comedies – including Sandler’s – go directly to streaming.
Maybe a movie like Billy Madison could squeak into theaters in 2025, but more likely as a shoestring project from a scrappy indie, rather than a big studio. Otherwise, straight to Peacock all the way. (That’s its spiritual home, though it’s currently streaming on Hulu, as is Quick and the Dead.) It’s hard to describe, for those accustomed to Sandler as a 30-year fixture of cinema, how much of an affront this Universal release was received as back in 1995. No, these weren’t the worst reviews of his career; higher-profile Tomatometer annihilations of big hits (Grown Ups) and less successful outings (Jack & Jill) alike were still to come. But one-star reviews abounded for what is now considered one of his unimpeachable classics.
Billy Madison certainly makes it easy enough to call out its essentially juvenile nature. Not only does Sandler begin the movie in full sing-song baby-voice-drunkard mode, he plays a rich, gibberish-spouting layabout who sets out to prove himself worthy of inheriting his father’s massive hotel company by repeating his elementary and secondary education. At the time, Billy Madison felt like an upping of the Jim Carrey ante, wringing laughs from intensely antisocial immaturity abstracted into a kind of performance art. But the soul of the movie has more in common with the lightly surreal silliness of Wayne’s World, albeit far less interested in (or in possession of) its cleverness. It also served as a primer of sorts on Sandler’s whole deal; just as Billy must re-educate himself before joining the working world, over the course of the movie Sandler evolves (such as he is) from gibbering idiot to halfway-presentable young adult (and tacitly, a big-business Republican, with a sympathy for the wealthy that would remain a bizarre hallmark of his supposedly underdog-filled career), ready(ish) for a movie career, and for decades more of growing up.
In that way, Billy Madison anticipates more comedy than just Sandler’s future blockbusters; the oeuvre of his old roommate Judd Apatow presents less literal variations on the same theme of belated coming-of-age. Of course, Sandler wasn’t movie comedy’s first man-child, but he did help popularize that figure after a decade dominated by Eddie Murphy, an SNL figure who was as cool as he was funny, as well as less personality-based high concepts like Crocodile Dundee or Three Men and a Baby. All of this, from a little $6 million opening.
As for the gunslinger that the Sandman defeated: The Quick and the Dead wasn’t especially well-reviewed either – and it’s absolutely terrific, maybe one of the most underrated movies of that year. If there was any concern that director Sam Raimi would water down his style on a bigger production than his Darkman or Evil Dead movies, they should have been out the window with the opening shot, which pulls back from a figure on horseback, riding through a gorgeous western landscape, to find a bedraggled fellow (Tobin Bell, from the Saw series!) digging frantically to bury his gold. Subsequent shots include Bell’s shifty eyes popping into the frame, a rifle-sight-POV shot as he aims his weapon at the figure in the distance, Sharon Stone’s figure backlit by the sun as she casts her shadow over Bell’s knocked-out body, and Stone riding into the distance against an impossibly bright blue sky. A minute later, there’s another gorgeous landscape via matte painting, and some impeccable sunsets in addition to, like, the shot where the camera is attached to a drinking glass as it sails across the room.
So not only does this movie not let up from Raimi’s cartoony style, it’s one of his most purely beautiful movies. Though it wasn’t a hit, it was the beginning of Raimi attempting the kinds of big-studio projects that eventually landed him Spider-Man and launched him into the stratosphere. It seems fitting that he would have practiced not just on his own horror-tinged superhero movie, but within the genre so often compared to superheroes in terms of their past cultural dominance.
Of course, 30 years ago, Batman Forever was one of the biggest movies of the year, and Quick and the Dead, despite its proximity to Unforgiven, was a flop that helped ding Sharon Stone’s reputation as a leading-lady draw, so maybe this bygone era wasn’t as different as we might like to think. Then again, it’s not just Adam Sandler’s first breakout that makes February 10th the most impressive release date of 1995. That weekend also saw an even smaller release: the U.S. bow of Shallow Grave, the feature debut from Danny Boyle. The darkly comic thriller did middling arthouse-level business here, but helped build hype for Boyle’s Trainspotting the following year; eventually, he’d go on to win an Oscar for Slumdog Millionaire. 2/10/95 puts all of the focus on momentary box office health and records into perspective. On a single weekend that saw the biggest movie top out around $6 million, one of the lowest number-one spots of the year, a decades-long movie star was minted, an Oscar-winning director made his debut, and a future maker of industry-changing blockbusters made a further step into the mainstream. Sometimes the future of movies, for better or worse, isn’t coming from a ticket-sale explosion.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
