The early 1980s was seen at the time as a moment of cultural renewal for British cinema. A number of critically acclaimed and (in several cases) commercially successful British films – including The Long Good Friday, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Gregory's Girl, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Local Hero, Educating Rita and The Killing Fields – led to talk of a ‘renaissance’ of British film-making that for once was not entirely hubristic. The mood was famously expressed by screenwriter Colin Welland, who upon collecting his Academy Award for Best Screenplay for Chariots of Fire at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on 29 March 1982, held it aloft and declared: ‘The British are coming!’ Chariots of Fire also won the Academy Award for Best Film: it was the first British film to triumph since Oliver! in 1968. Its success was surpassed the following year, when Richard Attenborough's Gandhi won eight Academy Awards, including Best Film and Best Director. While pointing out that, like other periods of revival and renewal, the renaissance of British film culture turned out to be short-lived, John Hill nevertheless contends that ‘the British cinema which emerged in the 1980s did contain a number of genuinely novel and distinctive aspects and did, at least temporarily, overcome some of the difficulties which beset British film-making in the 1970s’.

However, the new-found cultural vitality of British cinema in the 1980s once again disguised the underlying structural and economic weaknesses of the film industry. It was not a good time for exhibitors. The upturn in admissions in the late 1970s proved to be short-lived: it was followed by the most severe decline in cinema-going for a quarter of a century as annual attendances fell from 112 million in 1979 to an all-time low of 54 million in 1984.