I remember being hyped in high school about seeing Shampoo, The Exorcist, Chinatown, et. al. as soon as they first appeared. I didn’t experience anything comparable in the ’80s. Maybe it was because I was so involved in ballet and putting together my book on fashions of the ’60s. But Steve Vineberg’s No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Era describes a sea change:
“What happened to movies in the eighties—and has continued into the nineties—was not that good movies no longer got made, though there certainly seemed to be fewer of them. It was that, with shockingly few exceptions, they were ignored, dismissed, buried by a combination of studio publicists who felt they couldn’t sell them, critics who didn’t understand them or didn’t feel secure praising anything that was so clearly falling by the wayside, and audiences that never heard of them (blame the publicists and the critics) or assumed that they couldn’t be any good if they weren’t being hyped and systemically dragged into the national consciousness by massive ad campaigns.“
Yes, the 1980s really were a fateful turning point in American culture as well as politics.