Even though it’s been over 30 years since it first released and immediately embedded itself in pop culture forevermore – so much so that the knives are already out after Channing Tatum announced he dared headline a remake – it’s very easy to overlook just how much of a monster Ghost really was during its initial run in theaters.
The romantic fantasy with a supernatural twist has become such a well-known part of the zeitgeist – for better or worse given the sheer volume of parodies derived from its iconic/cringeworthy/delete where applicable pottery scene – that modern audiences might not have the slightest inkling of its success first time around.
Hauling in a mammoth $505 million at the box office made it the third highest-grossing movie in the history of cinema at the time behind only Steven Spielberg’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and George Lucas’ Star Wars: A New Hope, while it became the top-earning feature to ever hit multiplexes in the United Kingdom, as well as going down in history as LaserDisc’s best-seller ever.
That’s one hell of a legacy to leave behind, and it’s one streaming subscribers have been discovering all over again after FlixPatrol named Ghost as one of the most-watched titles on both Paramount Plus and iTunes so far this week. That’s not a bad return for a film that everybody knows regardless of whether they’ve seen it or not, but no matter how the impending do-over turns out, we’d be willing to place a sizeable wager on Ghost V2.0 coming nowhere near to matching its predecessor.