Release Year: 1982

Genre: Family, Sci-Fi

Director: Steven Spielberg

Writer: Melissa Mathison

Stars: Henry Thomas, Drew Barrymore, Peter Coyote

What's the coolest thing you've ever found in your backyard? An arrowhead? A $20 bill? A big pile of worms? 

Those are all pretty sweet finds, but in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Elliott makes the best backyard discovery of them all when he finds an honest-to-goodness alien.

Directed by Steven Spielberg (maybe you've heard of him?), E.T. hit theaters in the summer of 1982 and became an instant classic. In fact, E.T. was so beloved that it was re-released twice—once in 1985 and once in 2002—and it has the big bucks to back it up, having earned Universal Pictures an astonishing $435,110,554. 

Not bad for a family-friendly science fiction adventure that cost $10.5 million to produce.

But E.T. didn't just make bank. Its immense popularity also shaped the film industry. E.T. introduced audiences to the idea of product placement in motion pictures, and sent sales of Reese's Pieces skyrocketing. It also introduced audiences to a young, fresh-faced actress named Drew Barrymore (maybe you've heard of her, too?). Oh, and E.T. was one of the first films to be affected by piracy. No, not swashbuckling dudes with eye patches. We're talking about people with unofficial copies of the movie trying to make a buck off of the E.T. fever that gripped America in the '80s.

It wasn't just Joe and Jane Moviegoer who fell in love with E.T., though. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—you probably know them better as the Oscar voters—presented E.T. with four Academy Awards (Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Original Score) and nominated the film for five more trophies including Best Film Editing, Best Cinematography, Best Writing, Best Director, and Best Picture. 

That's a lot of gold.

E.T. is one of the rare films that was both a blockbuster and a hit with film critics. As Anthony Lane wrote in The New Yorker. "...Spielberg wrote a poem. And all the best movies are poems" (source).

Simply put, E.T. was a phenomenon. We'll let Turner Classic Movies explain what we mean:

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is more than a movie; it is one of those rare cinematic occurrences that strikes at exactly the right time and place, revealing the cultural zeitgeist of the moment.

In other words, pop culture went absolutely bonkers over E.T., and it's not difficult to see why. The film's focus on the excitement and wonder of childhood appealed not only to kids, but also their parents. And those parents spoke with their wallets. E.T.-related merchandise netted over $1 billion. Soooo many lunchboxes.

Released just a year after Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T. also cemented Steven Spielberg's status as a director to be reckoned with. After E.T., Rolling Stone famously dubbed Spielberg, "the most successful movie director in Hollywood, America, the Occident, the planet Earth, the solar system, and the galaxy" (source). Hyperbole? For sure. But Spielberg remains one of the most successful and influential directors working in Hollywood today.