1. The first film HBO produced, under the name HBO Premiere Films (which became HBO Pictures in 1986) was The Terry Fox Story. It's tied for HBO's second most aired movie of the '80s (along with The Cannonball Run).
2. Sept. 5th, 1981 was HBO's first continuous 24 hours of broadcasting, which became the norm for weekends. Until then, a typical day would last from about 5-6 pm to 12-1 am, with weekends starting sometime in the afternoon. Yes, HBO would sign off at the end of the night.
3. Dec 26, 1981 is when HBO first went 24 hours a day every day, including weekdays.
4. Sometimes HBO aired different versions of movies in the same month. Often they would offer separate dubbed or subtitled foreign films, like Fanny and Alexander, or different versions of films with different ratings, showing PG and R rated versions of Saturday Night Fever and Excalibur.
5. The first movie to have Closed Captioning on HBO was Superman III on April 2, 1984.
6. In 1984, a deal was struck between Paramount Pictures and HBO's competitor, Showtime, which gave them exclusive rights to many of their films for the next few years. While not an exhaustive list, here are some notable films that never aired on HBO in the '80s:
7. The first movie to air on HBO in the '80s was the 1978 Battlestar Galactica at 4 pm, January 1st, 1980. The last movie to air on HBO in the '80s was Beetlejuice at 8 pm on December 31st, 1989.
A note about air times: This site follows the same format as the HBO Guides, which is that the broadcast day starts at 6 am. Anything that airs before then is considered to have aired the previous day. (For consistency, all times shown are Eastern/Pacific.) So if you want to be super specific, and have midnight be the start of a new day, then the first film to air on HBO in the '80s was Richard Pryor Filmed Live in Concert at 12:30 am, Jan 1st. Here's what aired after midnight in the early AM hours of January 1st, listed in the 1979 guide on December 31st:
If there was something about a listing that I felt needed further explanation, I added a note in brackets in the description attributed to me: -JS.
And finally, a tip: If you click on Search when the search window is completely empty, that will display every single program in the database. You can then sort by different categories: Time Aired, Dates Aired, etc, ascending or descending by clicking on the column header.