The 1980s were probably the best decade for cinema. Hits such as The Empire Strikes Back, The Princess Bride, Predator, The Breakfast Club and Back to the Future were being released almost every year throughout the Reagan years, as if Hollywood had returned to a “golden age” under the presidency of an iconic actor. During this time, studios would produce their top-tier A-list films, but at the same time, smaller studios would release competing low-budget movies. One of the major “80s B Movie” companies was The Cannon Group, or as they were better known, Cannon Films. Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Cannon would release a large number of low-budget and low-quality movies, easily turning back the production costs and even being the first to aquire the rights to a certain character for film.

The Cannon Group was founded in 1967 by two film students, Dennis Friedland and Chris Dewey. Within a few years of doing English versions of European movies, the company began working on their own content. Beginning with Joe in 1970, Cannon quickly started to produce small scale, cheap movies that would get picked up by the major studios to sell to cheaper theaters, similar to the block booking practices of the 1930s-50s. However, this would not bode well for the company overall, leading to Friedland and Dewey having to sell off the company in 1979 to Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, two cousins who were making a name for themselves in the rebirth of B-movies. Under Golan-Globus, Cannon began to finally find their stride.

The company became known for their “mediocre” films, making as many as 43 a year and turning in a profit due to the low budgets and costs. However, despite their relatively bad quality and production values, Cannon was being seen as a major player in Hollywood at the time. Stars such as Chuck Norris and Dolph Lundgren appeared in Cannon productions, even launching the careers of some actors. The breakdancing movie Breakin' was also a Cannon production – and to show how fast they made movies, the often-parodied sequel, Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo was written, filmed, and released within the same year as the first film. Slowly, as the early 1980s went on, Cannon was becoming a larger studio, yet was still working on what would now be considered “cult films,” such as Highlander.

In 1986, Cannon had cemented themselves as a “serious” film studio. In doing so, they bought the film rights to a popular superhero, being Marvel's Spider-Man. Hiring a group of writers who did not read the comics, but instead only knew the premise – kid gets bit by spider, develops spider powers – the film was originally conceived as a violent horror film, where Peter Parker turns into a mutant spider and goes on a killing spree as soon as he is bitten by the radioactive spider. Marvel was leery about this script, and co-creator Stan Lee became involved to put a stop to the script. Cannon hired new writers who were familiar with the story, and Tom Cruise was being thrown around as a leading actor. However, the rights revered to Marvel in April 1990, paving the way for the 2002 blockbuster Spider-Man.

Their downfall began in 1987 when Cannon had been tasked with making the fourth Superman film, due to Warner Brothers loosing too much money on Superman III. The original script, featuring the villains Braniac and Bizarro, was deemed too expensive and complex, a concern carrying over from the early plans for the Supergirl movie (another unsuccessful project). This led to a major rewrite, wherein Superman would, in addition to Lex Luthor and a “clone” of himself, also take on nuclear war in a shoehorned political commentary. The effects budget was decreased from the previous installments in the series, causing badly-animated greenscreen backgrounds and the same shot of Superman flying towards the camera being used over and over in the film. The film was a critical and commercial failure, and actor Mark Pillow, who portrayed the new villain “Nuclear Man,” never acted again, and the Superman series did not get another movie until 2006. Christopher Reeve, the iconic Superman actor, disowned the film, even up through the release, citing the cut budget and lack of direction.

To cash in on the then-successful “toy movie” genre that had been primarily filled with adaptations of Hasbro toylines, such as the 1986 Transformers: The Movie, Golan-Globus/Cannon got the rights to produce a film version of the hit cartoon and Mattel toy He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. Despite the fantasy setting, Cannon elected to bring He-Man onto Earth in order to save money and time filming. This caused the film to basically become “teens meet He-Man,” and as with Superman IV, the film bombed both commercially and critically. The toyline also suffered, coming to a halt in the early 1990s. Masters of the Universe essentially went the same way as Spider-Man, but in reverse – writers who knew the show and story wrote a script, but it was passed up to do a smaller, less accurate story that would be cheaper to make and easier to sell on mainstream audiences. It should also be noted that after this failure, the toy movie genre took a major hiatus, truly returning to public view in 2007 with the release of Transformers.

Cannon's reputation of making bad movies had caught up to them. The sequel they had planned for Masters of the Universe was scrapped and rewritten to become Cyborg. As the early 1990s film styles and genres took form, Cannon had to try to keep up. They made less movies, worked on less projects, and Golan left the company. He took the rights to Spider-Man and the recently acquired Captain America rights to his own company, releasing the 1990 bomb Captain America as a direct-to-video movie. As the company was not getting back their money, and because there was little interest in their projects following the 1987 disasters, Cannon released their final film, Hellbound, in 1994. Two direct-to-video movies were released under the Cannon banner in 1995 and 1996, but these had already been completed and were just to recoup some losses.

It's a short, condensed history of a famed “bad” film studio. Starting in the late 60s, Cannon attempted to be brought to the forefront, and even after becoming major players during the 1980s, they still fell into the trap of rushing productions. Had Superman IV: The Quest for Peace not have been the abysmal failure that it was, or if Cannon had switched to doing more high-scale films, similar to their competitor, Orion Pictures, perhaps they would still be in existence today. Yet as any Hollywood story goes, the company let their box office returns run their system, and while there is nothing wrong with purposely making B-movies (The Asylum does this even now), it is obvious that eventually it will take a toll on the studio. Cannon may return in a one-off, nostalgic cash grab. But for now, we have almost thirty years of bad cult movie to look back on.