I'd go for what was occasionally called the 'cinema of wonder' era at the time, the mid-70s-mid-80s - basically Jaws through to Back to the Future via Superman and CE3K, when there was still more individuality and variety because studios were still trying to figure out what worked. It wasn't just fantasy and action, you had the likes of Gandhi, The Towering Inferno and A Bridge Too Far doing decent business as well. And not just for the films that were blockbusters, but for the really ambitious big ticket films that weren't but which were really interesting or entertaining all the same (The Wind and the Lion, King Kong, New York New York, Sorcerer, Heaven's Gate, Ragtime, Popeye, Dragonslayer, Wolfen, Blade Runner, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Bounty, The Right Stuff, Once Upon a Time in America, Greystoke, Return to Oz, Young Sherlock Holmes, Lifeforce). There were just as many bad films as today but there was still a sense of being filmmaker led rather than demographic box ticking in mainstream audience pictures.
"Security - release the badgers."
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