Forty years ago this year, three of the most quoted movies in American pop culture opened within about nine weeks of each other. Top Gun hit theaters on May 16, 1986, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off followed on June 11, and Aliens landed July 18 — a run so stacked that film historians are only now starting to talk about 1986 the way they’ve long talked about 1939 or 1999.

A Spring That Started in the Danger Zone

Top Gun opened on May 16, 1986, distributed by Paramount Pictures, according to release data compiled by Box Office Mojo. Tom Cruise’s Maverick went on to gross $183.5 million domestically and $360.5 million worldwide — numbers that made it the highest-grossing film released in the U.S. that year.

Then Came the Bug Hunt

Just over two months later, on July 18, 1986, 20th Century Fox released James Cameron’s Aliens, the sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, according to box office records maintained by The Numbers. The film earned $85.2 million domestically and $183.3 million worldwide, turning Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley into a bona fide action hero.

And a Kid Who Broke the Fourth Wall

Sandwiched right between them, John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off went wide on June 11, 1986, through Paramount, according to The Numbers‘ box office archive. It earned a comparatively modest $70.1 million domestically — small next to Top Gun, but more than enough to turn Matthew Broderick’s Ferris into one of the most impersonated characters of the decade.

The Rest of the Class of ’86

The three anniversary titles didn’t have 1986 to themselves. Oliver Stone’s Platoon opened December 19, 1986, through Orion Pictures and went on to gross $138.0 million domestically, per The Numbers, before winning Best Picture. Rob Reiner’s Stand by Me opened in limited release on August 8, 1986, from just 16 theaters, and still climbed to $52.3 million domestically according to the same archive. Crocodile Dundee, The Karate Kid Part II, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home also landed that year and each cracked the top eight highest-grossing films of 1986, based on box office rankings compiled on Wikipedia’s 1986 in film page.

A Year Stacked Deep, Not Just Wide

What makes 1986 unusual isn’t just the star power — it’s the range. That same calendar year gave audiences a Cold War fighter-jet romance, a claustrophobic sci-fi war movie, a coming-of-age teen comedy, a Vietnam drama, and a childhood memory piece about four boys walking down train tracks, and every one of them is still in circulation on streaming services and cable reruns forty years later.

The math backs up the range, too. Even outside the anniversary trio, the domestic grosses compiled on Wikipedia’s 1986 in film page put Crocodile Dundee around $174.8 million, The Karate Kid Part II around $115.1 million, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home around $109.7 million — meaning at least eight movies released that single year would eventually clear $100 million domestically, at a time when a $100 million gross was still a genuine rarity.

What ties Top Gun, Aliens, and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off together isn’t genre. What they share is that each one became the template its genre still copies: the needle-drop action movie, the female-led franchise sequel, the movie that talks directly to its audience. Forty years on, that’s a harder thing to pull off three times in a single year than any box office number can really show.