Raging Bull to Do the Right Thing. The decade Hollywood went blockbuster, Spielberg went stratospheric, and the directors of the 70s either adapted or didn't.
The 1980s is the decade Hollywood committed to the blockbuster. The franchise model that began with Star Wars (1977) and Jaws (1975) was, by 1985, the industry's default operating system. The studio system reorganised itself around the summer event film and the holiday-season prestige release.
What this meant for cinema: the mid-budget adult drama survived, but on narrower margins, often as independent or international productions. The directors who'd defined the 1970s either reinvented themselves (Spielberg moved into Indiana Jones and the prestige drama), or struggled (Coppola, Cimino), or found themselves more comfortable in genre (Scorsese's commercial films of the decade were uneven; he peaked at the end of it with Goodfellas in 1990). The decade's most-vital filmmaking often came from elsewhere — from independent American cinema, from Hong Kong (the John Woo and Wong Kar-wai years), from the Soviet Bloc, from Japan.
The advent of the home VHS market in the early 1980s changed Hollywood's economics significantly. Films that disappointed in cinemas could find profitability on tape — a window the industry had not previously had. By mid-decade, video rental had grown into a $5bn industry; studios began factoring video aftermarket into greenlighting decisions.
Independent American cinema also restructured. The Sundance Film Festival, founded in 1978, became by 1989 the industry's primary discovery mechanism — Steven Soderbergh's Sex, Lies, and Videotape that year is widely treated as the start of the modern American indie wave.
Animation re-emerged. Disney's hand-drawn animation department, dormant for a decade, returned to prominence with The Little Mermaid (1989), inaugurating the Disney Renaissance. Pixar (then a Lucasfilm spin-off) was building the computer-graphics capacity that would, in 1995, produce Toy Story.