44Big (1988)

The screenplay earned Gary Ross and Anne Spielberg nominations for a Writers Guild Award and an Oscar. A 12-year-old boy makes a wish at a carnival: He wants to be all grown up. Josh Baskin wakes up the next morning in the body of a 30-year-old man, a moment of discovery played hilariously by Tom Hanks. Unable to remain at home, Josh heads to New York City, where he lands a job at a prominent toy company, and his boy-like innocence makes him a marketing genius. Among other body-switching comedies of the era, Big stood tall “by applying consistent comic logic to the jest,” wrote David Ansen in Newsweek. “Big is hilarious because this is indeed how a boy would react to being trapped in an adult body in a grown-up world.”