“The First Wives Club” opened wide on September 20, 1996, and thirty years later it’s still the reference point for turning midlife divorce into a comedy anyone would want to watch twice.

Key Points

• Paramount Pictures released the film wide on September 20, 1996, and it earned $18.9 million in its opening weekend, according to box-office data compiled by The Numbers.
• The film went on to gross roughly $105.4 million domestically and $181.4 million worldwide against a $30 million budget — nearly six times its cost back, per The Numbers and Wikipedia’s box-office figures.
• That performance made it the 11th-highest-grossing film released in 1996, per Wikipedia.
• Goldie Hawn, Bette Midler and Diane Keaton starred as three college friends — a burned-out actress, a wisecracking single mother and an anxious housewife — who reunite after a fourth friend’s suicide and team up for revenge on the husbands who traded them in for younger women.
• The film became a genuine cultural touchstone for women reclaiming financial and personal power after divorce, a theme reflected in its lasting quotability and its influence on the female-ensemble comedies that followed it.

What made “The First Wives Club” land wasn’t just the cast, though putting Hawn, Midler and Keaton in one movie was itself a statement about what a studio was willing to bank on in 1996. It was the specificity of the anger: these were women in their late 40s and 50s, written as funny and vindictive rather than as cautionary tales or sidelined mother characters, at a moment when Hollywood rarely built entire studio comedies around women that age. The film’s closing musical number, the three stars dancing to Aretha Franklin and Cyndi Lauper’s cover of “You Don’t Own Me,” has outlived the movie itself as a stand-alone cultural moment.

Three decades on, its DNA is visible in everything from “Book Club” to “80 for Brady” — studio comedies built around established stars well past the age range Hollywood traditionally centers, betting that audiences would show up for women behaving badly instead of gracefully fading into supporting roles. Given that “The First Wives Club” nearly sextupled its budget doing exactly that in 1996, it’s a bet that should have stopped looking risky a long time ago.

The film was adapted from Olivia Goldsmith’s 1992 novel of the same name and directed by Hugh Wilson, with a screenplay credited to Robert Harling — the same writer behind “Steel Magnolias,” another script built entirely around women carrying a story Hollywood usually handed to men. That pairing of source material and screenwriter is a big part of why the film’s sharp-tongued dialogue has aged so much better than most mid-90s studio comedies.