Universal Pictures
(Welcome to Tales from the Box Office, our column that examines box office miracles, disasters, and everything in between, as well as what we can learn from them.)
“When my agent called me up and said ‘giant worms underground’ I was like, ‘Oh my God. My career is in the toilet.'” Those are the words of Kevin Bacon, star of “Tremors,” reflecting on his role in the now-beloved monster movie in the 2020 documentary “Making Perfection.” While that is a wild pitch and, admittedly, the movie was not a big hit in its day, it by no means wound up in the toilet. On the contrary, it kickstarted one of the most surprisingly enduring franchises in the genre landscape. Sometimes, big things have humble beginnings.
This journey begins with screenwriters S.S. Wilson and Brent Maddock, who met in college and quickly became writing partners. They broke out in Hollywood with the unexpected success of the 1986 family-friendly sci-fi flick “Short Circuit.” Once some hot new filmmakers hit it big, it’s always about what’s next. For this duo, it involved dusting off an old idea about giant underground worms. The result? An eventual classic, yes. But it sure as heck didn’t feel like a classic in the early going. And yet, the money — and the fandom — did follow.
In this week’s Tales from the Box Office, we’re looking back at “Tremors” in honor of its 35th anniversary. We’ll go over how the movie came to be, why it became difficult to secure a release date, what happened once it hit theaters, what happened in the years after its initial release, and what lessons we can learn from it all these years later. Let’s dig in, shall we?
The movie: Tremors
Universal Pictures
The movie as we know it centers on Val McKee (Bacon) and Earl Basset (Fred Ward) who decide to leave the very tiny town of Perfection, Nevada, to start a new life elsewhere. However, strange rumblings in the desert prevent their attempts to flee. A seismology student helps them discover that their desolate town is infested with giant creatures that live below the ground, which come to be called Graboids. The people of the town are forced to band together to survive.
When the script was pulled from the drawer of ideas, it was called “Land Sharks.” Quite probably because that was a character on “Saturday Night Live,” the title was eventually changed to “Tremors.” Universal Pictures snatched the rights to the project, with a then-unknown Ron Underwood signing on to direct. As for the origins of the idea? Wilson, writing on Stampede Entertainment’s official website explained:
“I had a job working as an editor at a navy base in the middle of the Mojave Desert. On weekends, when they weren’t shooting at the gunnery ranges, I was allowed to go hiking out there. One day when climbing over large boulders exactly like those in Tremors, off of which the people pole vault, I had a thought. ‘What if something was under the ground and I couldn’t get off this rock?'”
That idea was now becoming a major motion picture, one that ended up with an $11 million budget. On the one hand, that’s a relatively low-budget affair for a studio like Universal. Low-budget movies can be a low-risk, high-reward proposition. Once marketing is factored in, not to mention accounting for inflation and what that would look like in today’s dollars, it was still a sizable risk to take on an out-there idea with an untested director.
Tremors was an outside-the-box gamble for Universal
Universal Pictures
From the casting of “Family Ties” star Michael Gross as the gun-toting Burt Gummer to constructing expensive, giant mechanical sandworms, the studio was not only taking a gamble on “Tremors,” but they were allowing these untested filmmakers to think outside the box. Mind you, this was years before Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” combined practical effects with CGI to carve a path for the future of filmmaking. All of the Graboid shots had to be done practically. That was no easy task, particularly on a small budget.
Creatively speaking, finding the tone of the film was tough. The casting of Gross, a man known as a straight-and-narrow dad on TV, as a gun nut, speaks to that. Wilson and Maddock had an issue finding a balance between the horror and the comedy. Speaking on the Stampede Entertainment Q&A board, Wilson explained how they settled on the tone in the final script:
“It started as a sort of homage to ’50s horror, but the first drafts kept getting more and more funny as we came up with jokes. Later in the process (we did seven drafts), we felt that the comedy was ruining the scary moments, so we began taking jokes out until we ended up with only comedic moments that arose naturally out of the situation. It became a scary movie with genuinely funny moments. Ultimately that hurt it when it went to theaters.”
Indeed, Universal had a horror/comedy with a solid cast and great practical creature effects, but one that they didn’t exactly know how to market. It also didn’t help that, initially, when the film was rated by the MPAA, it received an R. Mind you, this was decades before movies like “Deadpool” would prove that R-rated movies could also be legitimate blockbusters. The film was delayed from its original November 1989 release to allow some changes to get it down to a PG-13, such as removing uses of the F-bomb. Unfortunately, the delay and the lowered rating didn’t help the picture’s commercial prospects.
The financial journey
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January has, for years, been considered something of a dump month in Hollywood. It’s not when studios bring their A-game, generally speaking. The big draw is often Oscar season movies expanding into more theaters, while stuff studios don’t know what to do with otherwise enters the fray. Enter “Tremors,” which hit theaters on January 19, 1990. Even in the original trailer, it was evident that the studio wasn’t sure how to market the film. Lean into the comedy? Or push it as a straight-up horror show?
On opening weekend, it was crystal clear that this confused marking didn’t exactly resonate with the general public. Despite being the only new wide release that weekend, “Tremors” opened at number five on the charts, taking in just $3.7 million. It scarcely did better than eventual Best Picture winner “Driving Miss Daisy,” which made $2.6 million in its sixth weekend on far fewer screens.
Even though the film didn’t drop very hard the following week, that low opening weekend killed its chances of breaking out. By mid-February, it was out of the top ten entirely. “The head of Universal did call me and said, ‘Well, we just blew it,'” Wilson recalled in “Making Perfection.”
All told, “Tremors” made just $16.6 million domestically, with virtually no international grosses to speak of. Or, at the very least, those grosses weren’t widely reported. In those days, the overseas box office wasn’t quite as important, or as widely circulated, as it is now. The film was a straight-up bomb in its original run. Fortunately, it would go on to find new life later that year.
Tremors became a franchise – thanks to the golden era of home video
Universal Pictures
The VHS boom of the late ’80s and early ’90s gave Hollywood a new revenue source. It also acted as a bit of an insurance policy. If a movie fails at the box office, it just might find its audience on home video instead. Such was the case with “Tremors,” which rapidly shot to the top ten on the video rentals charts after its VHS release. That’s where its reputation blossomed.
It wasn’t long before Universal realized there was money to be made with a sequel. That took the form of “Tremors 2: Aftershocks” in 1996. Though originally conceived as a theatrical release, it shifted to the home video department at the studio. In the production notes for the film, it’s explained that the love for the first movie had grown so much that craftspeople were willing to work at a reduced rate just to make sure the sequel happened.
“There were so many actors and technical experts in the industry that wanted to see this film made, that everyone started lowering their rates and devising creative ways to cut corners. The film got the green light for production at just under 4 million dollars. That is under a third of the original ‘Tremors’ budget of 11 million.”
“Aftershocks” was also a hit, leading to another sequel, “Back to Perfection,” in 2001. We then got a prequel, “The Legend Begins” in 2004 before the series took a long break. In 2015, it was revived with “Bloodlines,” paving the way for a new trilogy including 2018’s “A Cold Day in Hell” and 2020’s “Shrieker Island,” which was sort of positioned as an ending to the franchise. Gross’ Burt Gummer anchored nearly every one of these sequels, even appearing as one of the character’s ancestors in the prequel.
“Most people don’t realize that it wasn’t a successful movie,” Bacon mused in “Making Perfection.” Even I must admit, in doing my research for this very column, I was a little shocked to see just how bad the budget-to-box-office ratio was in its initial run.
The lessons contained within
Universal Pictures
35 years and seven films later, it’s safe to say that this franchise is beloved. The original has since been given releases on just about every format imaginable, including a 4K release from Arrow Video several years back. Not bad for a bomb that seemed dead on arrival.
“Part of the reason I think it didn’t do as well when it came out was the horror films at that time were very dark, very scary,” Underwood later said of “Tremors” upon reflection. “This film was lighter because it had people that you cared about who had a lightness to them and a sense of humor despite the awful situation they were in.”
Looking back now, it’s truly a shame that this would almost certainly not happen in today’s climate. DVD isn’t totally dead, but the home video market isn’t what it once was. Movies run the risk of being lost in the streaming algorithm. Studios don’t have a lot of patience these days and if something doesn’t work after its first couple of weekends, they write it off and move on.
One can only hope that VOD could, in theory, save the next “Tremors” from a grim fate. The one thing that can be helped is that Hollywood studios can try to think of things on a longer timeline. That is, admittedly, easy for a guy with no skin in the game to say. To quote Earl Bassett, “You never plan ahead, you never take the long view, I mean here it is Monday and I’m already thinking of Wednesday … It is Monday right?”
