Extreme close up of a housefly's head and compound eyes

The Fly at 40: The Movie That Knocked Aliens Out of First Place

August 1, 2026 Bobby And Jason

By Bobby Catalano & Jason Pascoe·We were on Dance Party USAWe were with the Dance Party USA family in the studio every week while it played. The Golden Years! The feel is memory. The facts are research, checked against the record.

The Fly opened in theaters on August 15, 1986. That makes the 40th anniversary August 15, 2026. David Cronenberg directed it, Jeff Goldblum played the scientist who steps into a teleportation pod with a housefly, Geena Davis played the reporter who has to watch what happens next, and it won the Academy Award for Best Makeup.

Here is the part almost nobody says out loud, and it is the reason this one is ours. The Fly was not a weird little art film that found its people later on video. It opened at number one in America. It knocked Aliens off the top of the chart, and then it stayed up there a second week.

Was The Fly a hit when it came out?

It was the biggest movie in the country the weekend it opened.

On the weekend of August 15 to 17, 1986, The Fly took $7,007,423 from 1,195 theaters and finished first. Here is the top of that chart:

1. The Fly, $7,007,423, brand new
2. Armed and Dangerous, $4,348,276, brand new
3. Aliens, $4,303,173, fifth weekend
4. The Karate Kid Part II, $3,341,527, ninth weekend
5. Nothing in Common, $3,217,097
6. Top Gun, $3,117,183, fourteenth weekend

Look at number three. Aliens had been the number one movie in America the weekend before, and both films were released by 20th Century Fox, so the studio essentially knocked itself out of first place. Look at number six too: Top Gun was in its fourteenth weekend and still in the top ten. That is the shape of the summer The Fly walked into and won.

It was not a fluke, either. The following weekend, August 22 to 24, The Fly held number one with $4,725,970. That was the weekend Stand By Me broke wide, jumping from nineteenth place to second on 729 additional screens. It still did not catch The Fly.

By the end of its run the film had earned $40,456,565 in the United States and $20,172,594 overseas, for $60,629,159 worldwide, against a budget reported between $9 million and $15 million.

What is The Fly about, and who is in it?

Seth Brundle, played by Goldblum, is a scientist who has built a pair of telepods that can move matter from one to the other. He meets Veronica Quaife, a science journalist played by Geena Davis, at a press event, and she starts documenting his work. The pods handle objects fine and destroy living tissue, until Brundle cracks that too. Then, alone and convinced Veronica has gone back to her editor, he teleports himself. A housefly is in the pod with him. The computer, confused by two lifeforms, fuses them at the genetic level.

He feels wonderful for a while. Then his fingernails start coming off.

John Getz plays Stathis Borans, the editor, and the rest of the small cast includes Joy Boushel as Tawny, Leslie Carlson as Dr. Brent Cheevers, and George Chuvalo as Marky. Cronenberg himself turns up as a gynecologist. Howard Shore wrote the score, and the London Philharmonic Orchestra played it.

Goldblum and Davis were a couple by then, but they were not married yet. They married on November 1, 1987, more than a year after this film opened, and Davis filed for divorce in October 1990. She met him on the set of Transylvania 6-5000 in 1985. Two years after The Fly she was in Beetlejuice, and she won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for The Accidental Tourist.

How did they make Brundlefly?

Chris Walas, Inc. designed and built the makeup over three months, with Walas leading and Stephan Dupuis as makeup artist. The trick that makes it work is the order they did it in: the finished Brundlefly creature was designed first, and then every earlier stage was worked backward from it, so each step was aimed at something that already existed.

There are seven stages. One and two are barely there, rash-like discoloration, small sores, tiny fly hairs on Goldblum’s face and the patch growing out of the wound on his back. Three and four bring prosthetics onto his face, then his arms, feet and torso, plus wigs with bald spots and crooked teeth. Stage four-B was cut from the film and required the first of two full-body foam latex suits. Stage five added a second suit and contact lenses that made one eye look bigger than the other. Stage six is the creature the crew called the “space bug,” played by cable and rod controlled puppets. Stage seven is a separate puppet for the final moments, which the crew called the “Brundlebooth” and then the “Brundlething.”

Cronenberg was after aging, not monsters. The transformation was designed as a metaphor for getting old, which is why Brundle loses his hair, his teeth and his fingernails before he loses his shape.

One more thing worth knowing about how careful they were: a rough cut screened at Toronto’s Uptown Theatre in the spring of 1986, and the audience reaction was strong enough that the “monkey-cat” sequence came out to keep people on Brundle’s side. A “butterfly baby” ending was previewed at a Fox screening and cut too.

What did The Fly win?

Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 59th Academy Awards on March 30, 1987. They beat The Clan of the Cave Bear and Legend. It was the film’s only Oscar. At the same ceremony Platoon won Best Picture and four awards total, Aliens won two, and Top Gun won one.

At the Saturn Awards that May, The Fly did better: Best Horror Film, Best Make-up for Walas, and Best Actor for Jeff Goldblum.

Which brings up the sore spot. Goldblum got no Best Actor nomination from the Academy, and plenty of genre fans and critics at the time had expected one. Roger Ebert put the film on his top 20 of 1986 and said that “Goldblum, I think, deserves an Academy Award nomination.” Gene Siskel, who named it the tenth-best film of the year, said afterward that Goldblum most likely “got stiffed” because older Academy voters generally do not honor horror films.

The critics were mostly on board. Metacritic scores it 81 out of 100 from 12 reviews. Rotten Tomatoes has 93% of 89 reviews positive. Time called it a shocking horror film and the most touching romance of the year. Caryn James at The New York Times went the other way, and thought the gore was excessive and the tone all over the place. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B, which tells you something honest: a lot of people admired this movie more than they enjoyed sitting in it.

Is the 1986 Fly a remake?

Yes, and it is worth being precise about what it is remaking, because three different things share the name.

George Langelaan wrote a short story called “The Fly” in 1957, and it ran in Playboy. The 1958 film came from that story, directed and produced by Kurt Neumann with a screenplay by James Clavell, starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens, Vincent Price and Herbert Marshall. That is the one with the tiny voice in the spiderweb crying “Help me! Help me!” Hedison wore a fly head that weighed twenty pounds and later said that “Trying to act in it was like trying to play the piano with boxing gloves on.” Two sequels followed, Return of the Fly in 1959 and Curse of the Fly in 1965.

The 1986 film is loosely based on both the story and the 1958 movie, and it throws out the premise that made the original work. In 1958 the change is instant. In 1986 it is slow, and you watch a man argue with it. Charles Edward Pogue wrote the first version of the script and shares the screenplay credit with Cronenberg.

Cronenberg’s film got its own sequel, The Fly II, in 1989, directed by Chris Walas. Cronenberg had nothing to do with it, and John Getz was the only actor who came back.

What August 1986 actually looked like from where we were standing

August 15, 1986 sits right in the middle of our run. That was the stretch when we were taping Dance Party USA every week in Philadelphia.

And the same Friday The Fly opened, so did Manhunter, Michael Mann’s film, the first movie ever made from one of Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter novels, with Brian Cox playing him, spelled Lecktor in that one. It opened eighth, made $8.6 million in the United States, and was written off as a bomb. Nobody in 1986 knew what that character was going to become.

That is one August weekend: a Cronenberg body horror picture at number one, the first Hannibal Lecter movie dying at number eight, Aliens in its fifth week, and Top Gun refusing to leave. We have said before that 1986 might be the best single year the 80s produced. Here is a little more evidence.

There is a coda to the marketing, too. The producers hired Bryan Ferry to record a song called “Help Me” to promote the film. Cronenberg did not think it fit, and it ended up buried in the background of the bar scene and left off the soundtrack album entirely. It surfaced two years later on a Roxy Music and Bryan Ferry collection. Set that title next to the most famous moment in the 1958 picture: a tiny voice in a spiderweb, crying “Help me!”

The honest bottom line

Forty years later, some of it is dated. The lab set is very 1986. The arm-wrestling scene plays broader than it did. And the last stretch of the film is genuinely hard to sit through, which is the point, but it is still true.

What holds up completely is the thing the film was actually about. Cronenberg said he was surprised when some critics read it as being specifically about AIDS, because what he meant was bigger than any one disease. He called the story “much more universal: aging and death,” and “something all of us have to deal with.” Watch it at fifteen and it is the grossest movie you have ever seen. Watch it at fifty and it is about a man losing pieces of himself while the person who loves him has to decide how to help. That is a different film, and it is the same film.

The tagline was “Be afraid. Be very afraid.” It got repeated so many times in so many other movies and shows that many people who say it have no idea where it came from. It came from here. It came out on a Friday in August 1986, and it was the number one movie in America.

Put it on. Maybe not during dinner.

Bobby and Jason

FAQ

When was The Fly released?
The Fly was released in theaters on August 15, 1986, which makes its 40th anniversary August 15, 2026.

Was The Fly a box office hit?
Yes. It opened at number one on the weekend of August 15 to 17, 1986 with $7,007,423, held number one the following weekend, and earned $60,629,159 worldwide.

Did The Fly win an Oscar?
Yes. Chris Walas and Stephan Dupuis won the Academy Award for Best Makeup at the 59th Academy Awards on March 30, 1987. It was the film’s only Oscar.

Is the 1986 version of The Fly a remake?
Yes. It is loosely based on the 1958 film starring David Hedison, Patricia Owens and Vincent Price, and on George Langelaan’s 1957 short story of the same name.

Who starred in The Fly?
Jeff Goldblum played Seth Brundle, Geena Davis played Veronica Quaife, and John Getz played her editor Stathis Borans. David Cronenberg directed.

Sources

Photos: Irina Petrova (CC BY 4.0), christopherharte (CC BY-SA 2.0), Alan Light (CC BY 2.0) and Alan Langford (CC BY-SA 3.0), via Wikimedia Commons.