After the first year in release, the fame of THE MACK continued. Black America kept talking about it. Once it hit the video market, The Mack instantly started to sell.

It did not enter the home video marketplace until 1991 – and yet it has sold over 500,000 units since then with no publicity at all. None. At an average price of ten dollars per unit, it has grossed over five million dollars.

In the process, the film achieved legendary status

Quentin Tarantino, in a series of interviews, called The Mack one of his all time favorite black films and in True Romance, had Christian Slater and Gary Oldham looking at a scene from the film on television and talking about it. Sinbad devoted an entire half hour show in his series to THE MACK, inviting the cheering audience to meet its director, Michael Campus.

The list of tributes grew.

The music world took up the film. Through the Eighties and Nineties, most major hip hop and rap stars paid homage to the film, from Doctor Dre to Snoop Dogg. Half of Snoop Dogg's interludes in his Doggstyle album/CD are about THE MACK. Dr. Drc's hugely successful 1992 CD, The Chronic, paid tribute to THE MACK by having Dr. Dre talk back to a segment of the audio track from the film.

The Mack is Back became another in a long string of hits paying tribute to the film.

Scenes from the film became part of Black film lore. The Players Ball has been recreated through the years around the country in annual events, from Los Angeles to New York, Chicago to Atlanta. Players and their ladies attend, decked out in their best outfits, arriving in their best rides.

The Players Ball events are bigger today than ever before and have become the subject of a HBO documentary.

The language of the film has become part of black culture, lines and scenes committed to memory, told and re-told.

On September 3rd 2003, New Line released the DVD of THE MACK, with an extremely limited publicity campaign.

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