One of the most commercially successful films of all time, it was produced on a $777,000 budget and since its initial release it has earned an estimated return well over $200 million in box-office gross and home video sales, not including merchandising.

On release it was critically praised and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Critical reviews for the film are largely positive today with its Rotten Tomatoes rating of 96% and a critical consensus as “One of the most influential of all teen films... a funny, nostalgic, and bittersweet look at a group of recent high school grads’ last days of innocence”.

Roger Ebert gave the film a full four stars and praised it for being “not only a great movie, but a brilliant work of historical fiction; no sociological treatise could duplicate the movie’s success in remembering exactly how it was to be alive at that cultural instant”.

Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called the film a brilliant work of popular art that redefined nostalgia as a marketable commodity, while establishing a new narrative style.

The film is considered to have rekindled public and entertainment interest in the 1950s and early 1960s, as acknowledged by internet reviewer MaryAnn Johnson, and that it influenced other similar films. It is also often cited as helping to give birth to the summer blockbuster.

The film’s success made George Lucas a millionaire with a net worth of $4 million, of which he set aside $300,000 to fund his space-opera project which later went on to become Star Wars.