InnerSpace blew up on Home Video today in 1988, after a wilted July 1st, 1987 theatrical release.
“Steven Spielberg Presents” really used to mean something.
In the early ’80s, it leapt off posters like a promise – Gremlins, Goonies, Back to the Future, that moonlit Amblin logo glowing like a seal of quality. These films felt handpicked by Spielberg, touched by the same blend of wonder, mischief, and blockbuster magic he brought to his own work.
But by ’86, Steven himself was pivoting toward prestige – The Color Purple, Empire of the Sun, Always – and his wide-eyed, high-concept fantasy was being stretched thinner across TV with Amazing Stories. The animation division was drawing up some serious competition for Disney (An American Tail, Land Before Time), and Roger Rabbit briefly reignited the fire, but the second half of the ’80s wasn’t as kind to Steven Spielberg Presents as the first.
The whimsical high stakes and sun-dappled sentimentality started giving way to… box office shrugs. Not bombs, exactly, just quality films that didn’t quite catch the public’s imagination. Young Sherlock Holmes. The Money Pit. Harry and the Hendersons. Batteries Not Included. Innerspace.
Which is a shame. Because Innerspace rules.
Joe Dante’s excellent Fantastic Voyage redux had the budget, the cast, and the crowd reactions to be a hit. But it wasn’t. Blame a catastrophically ineffective marketing campaign (the original poster was just a thumb and a finger holding…. Something?), a place-holder title nobody behind the scenes seemed to like, and an audience that didn’t quite know what they were being sold.
It wasn’t until home video that the movie took off – one of the first truly discovered-on-video hits. Suddenly, people knew what they had in their hands. The manic Martin Short body comedy. The Dennis Quaid smarm-to-charm arc. Meg Ryan before the rom-com factory kicked in. And Dante doing exactly what he does best – balancing cartoon logic with grounded character work, and sneaking heart into absurdity.
It’s sharp, silly, and confident in its tone – something a lot of mid-to-late ’80s Amblin output lacked.
Today, it’s often remembered as a hit. But at the time, it was a considered financial disappointment by Hollywood accounting standards, part of that string of late-’80s Spielberg-produced films that seemed to signal the end of an era. By the time Hook arrived, that whole brand of big-hearted hi-concept filmmaking was pivoting to shift towards toothy theme-park spectacle, the budgets were swelling, the cgi was improving, but the magic didn’t always scale.