what Walter and (cinematographer) Andy Laszlo and our editor were doing visually on the film. And I felt, as I watched the post-production process going on, I just saw the film getting better and better. More impressive. To the point where I thought it was going to do well. And I thought that we had done what we set out to do. Created the world that we set out to create.... It was a movie that was built to succeed. It's funny. The movie screened very, very well. I remember, after the first screenings, people told me that I was going to be rich for life. There was tremendous love and confidence. Reception Box office Streets of Fire fared poorly at the box office, opening in 1,150 theaters on June 1, 1984, and grossing $2.4 million during its first weekend. After 10 days, it made $4.5 million, while fellow opener Star Trek III: The Search for Spock grossed $34.8 million in the same time. Gross says Hill was making Brewster's Millions at the time. "Joel got off the phone with Universal and said, "We're dead." We sat down, I remember, in a little park. In downtown LA. And we started giggling, in that way people do when things are terrible...there's the song in the movie called "Tonight Is What It Means to Be Young". And I remember, in the park, Joel saying, 'Today Is What It Means to be Dead'." The film went on to make a total of $8 million in North America, compared to a production budget of $14.5 million. "I was shattered when the film didn't perform", said Gross. "That broke my heart...I hoped, by the time the movie finished, that it would be whipped into a shape and design that would have a real impact. And then it didn't, and that was sad." Critical response Janet Maslin of The New York Times criticized the film's screenplay as being misogynistic and "problematically crude." Gary Arnold wrote in The Washington Post that as "romantic leads, Paré and Lane are pretty much a washout", and that "most of the action climaxes are treated as such throwaways that you begin to wonder if they bored the director." Jay Scott wrote in The Globe and Mail that "when Streets of Fire is speeding by like Mercury on methedrine, the rush left in its wake cancels out questions of content. But the