Movie fans at San Diego Comic-Con's Hall H overnight may have felt like they stepped out of Doc Brown's DeLorean. Of the major projects unveiled at the Hollywood expo, all of its headliners were '80s-adjunct.
There were peeks at Cats, the big-screen reimagining of Andrew Lloyd Webber's 1981 musical, starring Taylor Swift and Rebel Wilson; It Chapter Two, the sequel to the 2017 smash remake of Stephen King's 1986 bestseller; and, most notably, Top Gun: Maverick, the long-awaited sequel to Tom Cruise's 1986 blockbuster.
Cruise and his deadened grin were on hand to debut the film's trailer, a fan-pleasing montage featuring topless beach football, jet-fuelled salutes, and yes, those iconic Ray-Bans. In his intro Cruise described the film as a "love letter to aviation", although a "love letter to the '80s" may have been just as accurate.
At this point, if we take, say, Adam Sandler's The Wedding Singer (1998) as one of the industry’s earliest '80s-inspired callbacks, Hollywood's nostalgic lark has already run over twice as long as the original decade. Recent months have seen reboots of Child's Play (1988) and Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) hit cinemas, while Ghostbusters 2020 is already shaping up as next year's biggest blockbuster. As an '80s child I'm amused, but a decade that gave us ALF and Balki Bartokomous should not be so influential.