Summary

  • Airport '77 featured an ensemble cast of legendary older stars, similar to what The Expendables did with action heroes in the 21st century.
  • The star-studded cast of Airport '77, including James Stewart and Jack Lemmon, contributed to its massive box office success.
  • Despite facing competition from Star Wars, Airport '77 was a major blockbuster, grossing $91.1 million worldwide in 1977.

Sylvester Stallone famously assembled a star-studded cast of old-school screen legends for The Expendables, but the classic disaster movie Airport ‘77 pulled that casting trick first. The Expendables launched Stallone’s third franchise after Rocky and Rambo with the conceit of bringing all of Hollywood’s action movie legends together for one big all-star action epic. Stallone was ed by Jason Statham, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jet Li, Bruce Willis, Dolph Lundgren, and many more. The sequels brought in Jean-Claude Van Damme, Wesley Snipes, Harrison Ford, and Mel Gibson.

While The Expendables is the most iconic movie star team-up of the 21st century, it wasn’t the first film to bring a bunch of aging A-listers together in a stacked ensemble. It’s the first movie to bring together stars who are renowned for a specific genre, but it’s not the first to team up a bunch of stars who could each be headlining their own films. More than three decades before Stallone would flick through his rolodex to put the cast of The Expendables movies together, Airport ‘77 put together its own giant cast full of revered movie stars.

Airport '77 Brought Together An Ensemble Cast Of Great Older Stars

The cast of Airport '77

The third installment in the Airport franchise, Airport ‘77, takes place on a private Boeing 747 full of VIPs and invaluable artwork. After the plane is hijacked, it crashes into the ocean in the Bermuda Triangle, forcing the survivors into a desperate fight for survival. George Kennedy reprised his role as Joe Patroni from the previous two Airport films, but he wasn’t the only major movie star in the cast. In fact, just about everyone in this movie is a massive star.

Kennedy is ed by Hitchcock collaborator James Stewart, Jack Lemmon, Christopher Lee, Olivia de Havilland, Joseph Cotten, and Brenda Vaccaro – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. These aren’t action stars like the cast of The Expendables, but they were all screen legends in their 50s and 60s at the time. And like the cast of The Expendables, they all came together for a big-screen team-up.

Airport '77 Was A Major Box Office Success

The poster for Airport '77

Casting a planeload of A-list stars paid off, because Airport ‘77 was a huge box office success when it arrived in theaters in 1977. In a 1990 article titled “Universal’s Foreign Champs,” Daily Variety listed Airport ‘77’s worldwide box office gross as $91.1 million, which is a heck of a lot more than its budget of $6 million. Adjusted for inflation, that comes to about $470 million today. Airport ‘77 was a bona fide blockbuster (even bigger than The Expendables) in spite of competition from none other than Star Wars.