If Hollywood moguls had a New Year's wish, it would be that every week was Christmas. This season, box-office cash registers have been ringing like sleigh bells, to push the 1987 theatrical take toward a record $4.2 billion, up 11% from 1986. Even more encouraging for industry executives was the return of a species that had looked endangered throughout the year: the comedy.
Flashback. From New Year's Day until Thanksgiving, not a single old- fashioned feel-good comedy was to be found among the ten top-grossing films released in 1987. Audiences seemed to take more pleasure in the spectacle of people and things that went blam! in the night: Fatal Attraction, The Untouchables, Lethal Weapon, Predator. Oh, there were cop comedies (Beverly Hills Cop II, the No. 1 hit, and Stakeout and Dragnet) and a devil comedy (The Witches of Eastwick) and an oddly amoral Michael J. Fox comedy (The Secret of My Success -- sort of Wall Street for the Smurf set). But all these films traded in physical or emotional degradation; they left an acrid aftertaste. One began to wonder how long Hollywood could continue to cash in on its own and the nation's cynicism.
Answer: until 3 Men and a Baby began gathering its December momentum. Here was an amiable, air-headed fable about baby love. Its male leads were two TV stars, Tom Selleck and Ted Danson, who had never seemed big enough for the big screen and a third, Steve Guttenberg, best known for fronting the Police Academy farces. The story -- of three roguish bachelors forced to care for an abandoned infant -- cradled few surprises and, for great barren stretches, got lost in a draggy drug plot. The film's direction had all the comic subtlety one would expect from that Merlin of mirth, Star Trek's Leonard Nimoy. Maybe the producers thought he was Doctor Spock.
No matter: the movie had a high awww-Q. Audiences rushed to indulge its inanities and curl into its warmth, to google like proud relatives when the infant appears at a construction site in a pink hard hat, or when Selleck tries, too manfully, to diaper his fidgety bundle for the first time. There is nothing sinister about the success of a bad picture that makes people feel good. Imagine: people want to enjoy themselves at the movies. Sometimes they can convince themselves they had a fine time even at an inferior show. It guarantees they get their money's worth.
And a little child shall lead them. Hollywood got happier as viewers adopted the movie and word of mouth kept Baby booming. Even at Christmas, after a month's exposure, 3 Men easily led the box-office pack. By early this month it will have clambered up the Top Ten list to become 1987's fourth biggest hit. In its wake have come half a dozen newer comedies, most of which are Christmas carols in disguise. It is as if the industry realized that at holiday time comedies need to begin as Scrooge and end up as Santa. They must pretend to a cleansing meanness of spirit they cannot honorably sustain. In movie terms, they wear the mask of the Me-First '80s only to reveal the crinkly face of '30s romantic farce. Two of them boast the most ingratiating doll faces in today's Hollywood: the cartoon countenance of Goldie Hawn, in Overboard, and the Garbage Pail Kid visage of Danny DeVito, in Throw Momma from the Train.