here’s an article talking about a rare feat … this weekend saw two popular movies open at the theaters at the same time and the sales pitch to the theatre bookers and it attempts to dispel a few myths about a certain movie series …
So which one did you see if they were in your area?
I know I watched both but could not tell you which one that weekend. But I seem to recall Smokey had the bigger promotion. Star Wars I ended up watching 19 times in the movie theater, but on this weekend it was not that well known yet. It was really a sleeper.
Before Empire Strikes Back, seeing a movie during its opening week wasn’t really a thing you made a point of doing. At least not for a teenager. I wasn’t even aware of Star Wars until it had been out for a few weeks. I don’t even remember any TV ads. If I saw a movie that weekend it was probably something that had already been out for a few weeks like Annie Hall. I didn’t see Star Wars or Smokey & The Bandit until well into Summer break.
I didn’t see Star Wars until later in the summer, and I never saw Smokey and the Bandit in a theater. (I’m not even sure I’ve seen more than a few scenes.) So I voted for Star Wars (which IIRC I saw several times that summer).
Oops! I voted Star Wars based on which one I would see now, knowing what I do about the two movies. But if I had seen one that weekend, the opening weekend for both, it would almost certainly have been Smokey, so I would like to change my vote. My 19 times for Star Wars did not start until later, after it became such a phenomenon. I even remember reading in Time or Newsweek about the long lines Star Wars was generating. I see from the linked article in the OP that Smokey was No. 1 that weekend, and that would be right. Burt Reynolds was hugely popular at that time, and lots of people wanted to see that movie, especially in West Texas, where I was stuck.
In fact, I’m highly suspicious of the poll answers. Six for Star Wars and zero for Smokey so far. I think Smokey would win out if honestly based on the situation at the time, not what you know now.
I agree. Opening weekend wasn’t a big deal back in the seventies. It wasn’t like you were going to post about a new movie on the internet the next day.
I’m not even sure movies had national opening weekends back then. Movies were still on film and had to be physically transported to theaters. I think studios only made a certain number of copies and different areas saw them at different times. I grew up in rural New England and we were probably seeing movies several weeks after they had been released in big cities.
For what it’s worth, I did see both Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars during their original theatrical runs. I also watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Deep, High Anxiety, The Last Remake of Beau Geste, Oh God!, The Spy Who Loved Me, and Wizards in theaters that year. Mostly at this theater.
This was when I was graduating from high school.
This. In Cleveland, Ohio, I remember Star Wars arriving with some hoopla, some buzz, behind it already in late June. I never heard of it until I read about it in the newspaper in late June—the day before I went overseas. On my way back to America 6 weeks later, all the Americans I met were talking about Star Wars. I had missed the great summer hoopla, but once back in America the whole nation was in the grip of Star Wars fever. I never did participate, though.
I have no memory at all of Smoky and the Bandit from that time. If asked, I could not have given its year as 1977. I took no notice of it.
All I remember from the movies from the given time frame is Annie Hall.
My then-boyfriend and I went to see Star Wars the day it opened. And then went back the next day to see it again. 
It might have been the first time I’d gone to a movie on opening day. All I knew about it was that there was a news anchor on TV the night before saying “This Star Wars looks like kind of a western, but… in space?”
That’s all I had to hear. I was up early and waiting in the longest line I’d ever seen. A friend and I got the last two tickets, but we had to sit in the front row. Why’s that a problem? It was in an old vaudeville theater, and the seats went right to the bottom of the screen. We watched with our necks thrown back, staring straight up… and had trouble telling what was going on. We saw it again that night, from the back.
Saw Star Wars. I was a SF/Fantasy fan, not a whatever you call S&tB type flicks. I vaguely remember S&tB on TV - it isn’t something I would have spent money upon.
I saw Star Wars in a General Cinema twin (before they quaded it) in August. BIG screen then, and the Star Destroyer kept coming, and coming and coming.
Fast forward to 1980 and The Empire Strikes Back. At the Sack Charles in Boston, 70mm and STEREO. Couple hundred crazed fans and a big screen, second show. After the movie, we cross the line that had wrapped around the cinema and meandered down the block, to discover the head of the English department at my high school, and one of the teachers. They were, of course, playing hookie from their jobs. As seniors, we were out already.
I “saw” Star Wars that week. I was six weeks old. My parents learned that night that movie theaters are no place for a six week old baby. When my brother was born we got cable.
I’ll go Johanna one further. To this day I have never seen* Smokey and the Bandit* from start to finish.
Star Wars got a cover blurb (although not a cover photo) on theMay 30, 1977 issue of Time magazine, and a dozen photos in the story within.
According to Wikipedia, SATB opened in 386 theaters and grossed $2.7 million over Memorial Day weekend. Star Wars opened in just 32 (and a few more a couple days later ) theaters the first weekend, but grossed $2.55 million. Neither one went into a truly national release until July.
That sounds like the Showcase Cinemas theater in which my brother and I saw Star Wars. We went there several times before we were finally able to see the movie. The first few attempts, the theater sold out before we got to the ticket office. (BTW, in those days, if you want to know what was playing and when, you had to look for the ads in the entertainment section of the newspaper, or you called the theater directly. They had a recording, playing on a loop, in which someone listed the movies and show times.)
I saw Star Wars several times that summer. I don’t recall what I saw Memorial Day Weekend, but among the flicks I saw that summer were:
**The Spy who Loved Me
Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
The Rescuers
Harry and Tonto
A Bridge Too Far
The Island of DR. Moreau
The Deep
**
I saw Sorceror a lot later, and I’m not sure if I’ve seen all of Smokey and the Bandit even now. But I saw Star WArs about half a dozen times that summer, at the Charles Street Cinema in Boston (where it played for a solid year) and in Rochester, NY.
You might be right if we were polling the general public at random, but this site is sufficiently geeky that that’s what I would expect.
It was Smokey and the Bandit because my mom wanted to see it.
My pal Scott and I didn’t get to Star Wars until it became a thing.
Yeah, I’d expect it too. But I feel a lot are voting from the perspective of 2020. Of course you’re going to pick Star Wars now. Imagine it is 43 years ago. Now, maybe this would be mainly for places like West Texas, but Smokey was being looked forward to by a lot of people including non-rednecks. I know I saw it, just don’t know if it was that weekend. But if I did see one that weekend, it would have been Smokey just from all the expectations. Star Wars simply did not appear on my radar until Time et al started gushing over it.
In my suburban Midwest crowd, Smokey and the Bandit was considered a redneck movie for Southern hicks who listened to country music radio stations and watched Dukes of Hazzard.