Richard Donner directed, Chris Columbus wrote and Steven Spielberg dreamed up the story: four decades on, the Amblin treasure hunt set in Astoria, Oregon, is in the National Film Registry and still waiting for the sequel everyone keeps promising.

The premise of The Goonies fits on the back of a treasure map. A country club wants to expand over the Goon Docks, a working-class corner of Astoria, Oregon, and the families who live there are about to lose their homes to foreclosure. On what should be their last weekend together, a handful of boys rummaging through an attic find a 1632 doubloon and a map that claims to lead to the hoard of One-Eyed Willy, a 17th-century pirate. Directed by Richard Donner from a screenplay by Chris Columbus, based on a story by Steven Spielberg, the 1985 film turns that find into a race underground against a family of criminals who want the same gold.

Four boys, a map and the Fratelli family

The boys call themselves the Goonies. Mikey Walsh (Sean Astin) is the asthmatic leader who refuses to accept the move; Data (Ke Huy Quan), the Walshes’ next-door neighbour, is a James Bond fan who builds his own gadgets; Mouth (Corey Feldman) is Mikey’s best friend, named for his tongue and fluent in Spanish; and Chunk (Jeff Cohen) is the clumsy one with a habit of telling tall tales. To get out of the house they tie up Mikey’s older brother Brand (Josh Brolin), who soon follows them along with Andy (Kerri Green), a cheerleader with a crush on him, and her best friend Stef (Martha Plimpton).

The map points to an abandoned restaurant on the coast, and the restaurant turns out to be the hideout of the Fratellis: Jake (Robert Davi), a counterfeiter who has just escaped from jail, his brother Francis (Joe Pantoliano) and their mother, Mama Fratelli (Anne Ramsey). The kids find a tunnel in the basement and go down it. Chunk, who heads off to alert the police, is caught by the Fratellis and left with their third son, Sloth (John Matuszak), a deformed and much-abused giant who turns out to be gentler than anyone in his family.

From there the story follows two lines. The Goonies work their way through the booby traps One-Eyed Willy left behind, collecting candles from the skeleton of an earlier treasure hunter, Chester Copperpot, while the Fratellis close in. Chunk and Sloth, now friends, follow the Fratellis’ trail. Everything converges in a grotto where the pirate ship Inferno lies at anchor, loaded with treasure, and the script saves one more trap, and one more reversal, for the moment the gold is in reach. The ending, with the foreclosure papers on the table, belongs to the film.

An Amblin production with three authors

The Goonies was produced by Amblin Entertainment, Spielberg’s company, and released by Warner Bros. on June 7, 1985, in 1,705 theaters. Donner produced it with Harvey Bernhard, the producer of his breakthrough horror film The Omen (1976). By then Donner had also directed Superman (1978), and 1985 was a busy year for him: Ladyhawke, his medieval fantasy with Matthew Broderick and Michelle Pfeiffer, came out a few months earlier. Lethal Weapon, the franchise that would define the second half of his career, followed in 1987.

For Chris Columbus, this was part of a remarkable run of Amblin scripts written before he ever directed a film: Gremlins (1984), The Goonies and Young Sherlock Holmes (1985). His own directing career, from Home Alone and Mrs. Doubtfire to the first two Harry Potter films, came later. Spielberg, who supplied the story, was in the middle of his most productive period as a producer; Sean Astin later wrote in his memoir, There and Back Again, that Donner and Spielberg were “like co-directors” on the set.

A real pirate ship on Stage 16

Principal photography began on October 22, 1984, and lasted five months, followed by six weeks of dubbing and recording. The shooting script ran past 120 pages, and several sequences were cut from the theatrical version; the best-known casualty is a fight with an octopus, still mentioned in the dialogue at the end. The crew included cinematographer Nick McLean, who also has a cameo as Mouth’s father, editor Michael Kahn, Spielberg’s long-time cutter, and production designer J. Michael Riva.

Riva’s team built the Inferno as a full-size replica of a pirate ship on Stage 16 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, one of the largest sound stages in the United States, which also held the caverns. According to Donner, the young cast was not allowed to see the ship before shooting the scene in which their characters discover it, and the take in the final cut is the second one, because the first reaction was too overwhelmed to use. Nobody wanted the ship afterwards, and the set was scrapped.

The exteriors were shot in Oregon. The old Clatsop County Jail in Astoria, where Jake Fratelli escapes at the start, is now the Oregon Film Museum, which opened on the film’s 25th anniversary. The museum where Mikey’s father works is the Captain George Flavel House, and the Walsh home is a real house at the east end of town. The bicycle ride to the coast leads to Ecola State Park and Haystack Rock in Cannon Beach, more than 26 miles south of Astoria, while the final beach scene was filmed far away, at Goat Rock State Beach in Sonoma County, California.

A young cast that went in very different directions

The casting has aged into a small history of Hollywood. Sean Astin went on to Rudy, to Samwise Gamgee in The Lord of the Rings and, in a knowing nod, to Stranger Things. Josh Brolin made his film debut as Brand; decades later came No Country for Old Men, Milk and Thanos. Corey Feldman had just done Gremlins and was about to make Stand by Me and The Lost Boys. Martha Plimpton later won an Emmy for The Good Wife, and Kerri Green starred in Lucas the following year. Jeff Cohen left acting and became an entertainment lawyer.

The most striking path is Ke Huy Quan’s. Data was his second role after Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and after years away from the screen he returned with Everything Everywhere All at Once, which won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in 2023. Among the adults, John Matuszak was a former defensive end who had won two Super Bowls with the Oakland Raiders, and Anne Ramsey won the Saturn Award for Best Supporting Actress for Mama Fratelli; Astin won the Youth in Film Award for Mikey.

Not everything about the production has aged comfortably. Donner himself described Chunk’s Truffle Shuffle, one of the most quoted moments in the film, as “painful” to shoot, because the joke came from mocking Jeff Cohen’s weight. It is a reminder that the film’s rowdiness was very much of its decade.

The music, from Cyndi Lauper to a lost score

The soundtrack album was built around Cyndi Lauper, whose “The Goonies ‘R’ Good Enough” came with a 12-minute music video in which most of the cast appear alongside professional wrestlers such as André the Giant and Roddy Piper, with a cameo from Spielberg. Dave Grusin’s orchestral score had a stranger fate: it stayed unreleased for 25 years. The score makes liberal use of Max Steiner’s theme from Adventures of Don Juan, and its main theme, “Fratelli Chase”, was reused in trailers for Innerspace and Scrooged; Varèse Sarabande finally issued the score in 2010 in a limited run of 5,000 copies, with a wide reissue in 2019.

From summer hit to cultural landmark

Commercially, the film did well rather than spectacularly. It opened with $9 million, second behind Rambo: First Blood Part II, and reached $63.9 million in the United States and Canada, enough to place it among the ten highest-grossing films of 1985, against a $19 million budget. Its reputation grew on home video: Konami turned it into video games in 1986, Astoria’s anniversary events have drawn 10,000 to 15,000 visitors, and in 2015 the town had to limit access to the Walsh house. In 2017 the Library of Congress added The Goonies to the National Film Registry. Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy has said that director Jon Watts came to her wanting to make “a sort of Goonies in Star Wars“, which became Star Wars: Skeleton Crew (2024).

The sequel that never quite arrives

A follow-up has been announced, denied and revived for almost four decades. Donner said for years that he had a story and Spielberg’s support, while members of the cast insisted Warner Bros. had no interest. Donner died in 2021 with nothing shot. In 2020 the surviving cast reunited over video for Josh Gad’s charity series and later for a live script reading. On February 14, 2025, Warner Bros. confirmed The Goonies 2 was in development, with Potsy Ponciroli writing and Spielberg and Columbus producing for Amblin. Ponciroli said in August 2025 that he had delivered a first draft, but no director or release date has been announced since.

Where it lands

Seen from 2026, The Goonies is a studio product that has outlived the system that made it: an original adventure built on a children’s dream of beating the bank, written by a young Chris Columbus and steered by a director equally at home with superheroes and horror. Its appeal is easy to explain on paper, with a map, a family of crooks, a hidden ship and a neighbourhood at stake. Whatever one makes of its noise and its very 1980s humour, few family films of its decade have kept a town, a cast and a studio talking about a sequel for this long.