This 1970 Action Thriller Was So Good That It Spawned Three Awful Sequels

The thriller “Airport,” directed by the team of George Seton and Henry Hathaway, was a big thing in the early 1970s. The film was an ensemble disaster piece that combined a bomb threat on board with an airport suffering from extremely hostile weather. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, with Helen Hayes winning Best Supporting actress. It also produced three separate series throughout the decade. However, the biggest disaster of all three was that…well, let’s just say they weren’t very good.

The consequences are not completely Unwatchable, as are the guilty pleasures of old disaster movies. 1979’s “The Concorde: Airport ’79” even made its way onto /Film’s list of underrated disaster movies worth watching. Overall, though, the trend of decline in quality and critical appreciation was very noticeable, which severely hurt the series at the box office. While “Airport” grossed just over $100 million, “Airport 1975” cut that in half with $47 million. “Airport ’77” barely worked its way to $30 million, and “The Concorde: Airport ’79,” which grossed $13 million at the box office, was the final nail in the coffin. (This, of course, is why it was underrated in the first place. It’s hard to appreciate something that almost no one has seen.) Put it all together, and the three sequels grossed just $90 million combined — $10 million less than the original film.

So what exactly went wrong with a series that went from a major awards season contender to the streaming video equivalent of the era? Let’s delve deeper into the “Airport” movies to find out.

In all fairness, it made perfect sense to turn Airport into a franchise. Although there were very few disaster films among the best films of the 1970s (that was the decade of “Star Wars,” “Jaws,” and “The Godfather”), the genre had a major role throughout the decade. After Gene Hackman’s “The Poseidon Adventure” legitimized disaster films in 1972, “Airplane” was on a roll. Too early to benefit from a large number of sequences. The problem: At some point, they forgot that said sequels had to live up to the original.

Much of the decline of excellence is related to a loss of focus. “Airport” is a powerful piece of cinema that uses its frenetic, snow-covered location to tell many different stories, and benefits from a cast that includes names like Burt Lancaster, Dean Martin, Jacqueline Bisset, Jean Seberg, and Oscar-winner Hayes. “Airport 1975,” directed by Jack Smit, is a very different film, depicting a control tower’s struggle to convince someone to land a stricken Boeing 747 passenger drone safely. Jerry Jameson’s “Airport ’77” adds a generous touch of “The Poseidon Adventure” to the mix by completely sinking a hijacked 747 at sea and turning the film into an underwater survival drama.

By the time David Lowell Rich’s “The Concorde: Airport ’79” rolls around, all warnings have been dispelled, and the film’s ragtag audience watches a supersonic Concorde plane roll through missile attacks while a high-tech device acts as a MacGuffin-style time bomb — a fun idea, sure, but hardly one that can ride The tail of an Oscar winner. The series, film by film, became its own parody, until the end of the 1970s, thankfully, ended the series as well.

There’s another reason why “Airport” lacks the cultural legacy it might have had without its increasingly bizarre sequels. In 1980, David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker unleashed their classic “Airplane!” satire, which remains incredibly funny more than 40 years later. Can you guess which franchise it preys on?

“airplane!” This film borrows liberally from “Zero Hour!” 1957, but many scenes are either heavily inspired by or directly adapted from Airport 1975. The sick child, the nun with a guitar, the unlikely heroic pilot tasked with landing the plane, the spunky stewardess with a romantic interest… it’s all there, and it’s “the plane!” Releases that left their mark in popular culture.

If “Airplane!” Using the “airport” franchise’s own tools to hijack a first-class seat in the commercial airline disaster movie genre isn’t enough, as the series later picked up another major departure from the 1980s satire genre. The one thread that connects the four “Airport” films is Academy Award winner George Kennedy, whose aviation-adjacent character Joe Petroni — a man of many hats who could work as a mechanic, a top employee at Columbia Airlines, or a pilot as the plot demands — appears in all four films. In 1988, Kennedy became an important part of another major parody film of the era, playing Captain Ed Hawken in The Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad.

Fortunately, Kennedy’s character is protagonist Frank Drebin’s boss… who, of course, is played by the comedy legend and “Airplane!” The outstanding Leslie Nielsen. It’s probably safe to say that Kennedy is now much more associated with “The Naked Gun” series than he is with “Airport,” which has cost “Airport” another point in the pop culture game.