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Dances With Wolves
Having hit it big with The Untouchables, Bull Durham, and Field of Dreams in the late 1980s, Costner finally got his passion project underway, this time both as an actor and director, based on the 1988 Michael Blake novel. Dances With Wolves stars Costner as a John Dunbar, a Union Army soldier who takes up a remote Army outpost after the war, befriends and assimilates into the local Sioux tribe, and then is considered a traitor to the U.S. forces. Mary McDonnell co-stars as his love interest, named Stands With Fist, in her first major film role.

It could be said that the western genre had peaked in the 1950s and 1960s and had been dead for years - Costner had himself had co-starred in Silverado in 1985, which was a box office disappointment. But you could also point to Pale Rider (1985) and Young Guns (1988) as recent westerns that opened at #1 for examples of life left in the genre. Dances With Wolves was an epic that occupied the space between Civil War projects like North and South (1985 miniseries) and Glory (1989) and those classic gunfighter westerns: a frontier movie.

The hand-wringing during production of this epic frontier/war movie was about Costner’s abilities to manage a complicated project as a first time director, and the budget overruns. But at release all that concern turned into praise. Critical reviews and audience reactions were very positive. The movie opened at 14 theaters this weekend with a $42,733 per-site average and expanded to over 1,000 theaters for Thanksgiving, taking the #3 spot and holding a top 10 box office position through the Oscars and up to Memorial Day weekend 1991. At the Oscars it won seven out of 12 nominations including Best Picture, Director, and Actor for Costner. During its run, the movie made $175 million in the U.S. and over $415 million worldwide. That made it the thirrd highest grossing movie of 1990, the highest grossing movie never to have held a #1 box office position (a record it held until My Big Fat Greek Wedding came along in 2002), and as of 2015 it’s still the highest grossing movie in the western genre.

The Return of Superfly
This third movie in the Superfly series came 17 years after the previous movie, Superfly T.N.T. In the first two movies, Ron O’Neal played Youngblood Priest, a drug dealer who rises above the enemies that try to keep him down. For the third movie, soap opera actor Nathan Purdee plays Priest, avenging his friend’s murder. Samuel L. Jackson is featured in the cast, having appeared in Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, and Mo’ Better Blues released a few months earlier. Curtis Mayfield returns to provide the soundtrack with songs by Ice-T, Eazy-E, and Tone Loc. Neither this movie nor the soundtrack made the impression that the first blaxploitation made. Opening at 260 theaters, audience interest was weak and the movie earned less than a million dollars overall.

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