The Rocketeer

Walt Disney Pictures released The Rocketeer on June 21, 1991. Directed by Joe Johnston, fresh off Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, it was based on comic artist Dave Stevens' character and set in Los Angeles in 1938: stunt pilot Cliff Secord (Billy Campbell) finds a stolen experimental rocket pack and becomes a helmeted mystery hero. Jennifer Connelly played his girlfriend Jenny; Timothy Dalton chewed scenery as matinee idol and secret Nazi agent Neville Sinclair; Alan Arkin was Peevy, the mechanic who kept him flying; and Terry O'Quinn was Howard Hughes. The whole thing was soaked in art-deco design and the spirit of the old cliffhanger serials — played entirely straight, with genuine affection for the source material, right down to a finale that crashes the villain into the Hollywoodland sign.

It cost somewhere between $35 million and $40 million to make — real money in 1991 — and grossed $46.7 million domestically, which wasn't enough. The audience came in smaller than expected, and in July 1991 the trilogy the screenwriters had envisioned was shelved before it could start. For years it was a footnote: a well-intentioned disappointment, a movie that cost too much and earned too little.

But the kids who caught it in theaters or rented it on VHS never forgot. There was that helmet — the finned, improbable art-deco helmet. There was the jetpack, the pure wish-fulfillment of flight. There were practical effects and real stunts, the kind of craftsmanship cinema was drifting away from. It was a superhero movie a full decade too early for the superhero boom, and for that reason it aged into something rarer: a cult classic remembered less as a financial disappointment and more as a snapshot of a cinema that believed in the earnestness of spectacle.