BOX OFFICE GROSS
-Rhett Butler, Gone With The Wind
The top grossing films in America are a list of familiar titles. Here are the top 10 money makers in the US:
- Titanic
- The Dark Knight
- Star Wars
- Shrek 2
- ET: The Extra Terrestrial
- Star Wars: the Phantom Menace
- Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
- Spider-Man
- Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith
- Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
In fact, of the top 25, all but 7 were made in since 2000, and only two were made before 1990. That's amazing, how popular films are now, huh?Well, there's a problem here. Ticket prices have skyrocketed in the last twenty years, driving box office numbers through the ceiling. Inflation has made the price of everything go up. You could go watch a movie in 1939 for 25 cents. Today the average price is closer to ten dollars.
Why did I pick 1939? Because if you adjust the box office earnings for inflation, that is you treat all the money as if it was at the same average dollar value, the number one earning movie of all time is... (drum roll)
Gone With the Wind. In today's dollars, it earned a staggering $1,450,680,400. That was before rentals, before a huge world market. That was just money earned from people plunking down one quarter each to watch a movie in theaters across the US alone. It made $198,676,459 from quarters in 1939. That's difficult for me to even imagine.Here's the real top 25 list, adjusted for inflation:
- Gone With The Wind
- Star Wars
- The Sound of Music
- ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
- The Ten Commandments
- Titanic
- Jaws
- Dr Zhivago
- The Exorcist
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
- 101 Dalmatians
- Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
- Ben-Hur
- Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
- The Sting
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Jurassic Park
- The Graduate
- Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
- Fantasia
- The Godfather
- Forest Gump
- Mary Poppins
- The Lion King
- Grease
Those other movies in the top 10 above? Here's where they came in:
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace - 19thWhen I look at that list and the diversity a few things occur to me.
The Dark Knight - 27th
Shrek 2 - 30th
Spider-Man - 34th
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest - 44th
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - 50th
Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith - 57th
First, clearly Lucas was gaming the ticket prices to get huge numbers. No surprise there, he always did: every new Lucas movie that has come out after Star Wars was with a higher ticket price. Every time they push the price up to release his films. That's how he can have so many Star Wars movies in the unadjusted top 100, by making tickets cost more and thus the numbers are bigger. After the incredibly disappointing, even insulting Phantom Menace, people were much more reluctant to watch the even more disappointing and insulting Attack of the Clones (number 83 overall). Still, even at number 83, that's an amazing feat: Lucas' movies make a ton of money by any metric (American Graffiti is number 42).
Notice the presence of ET in both of the lists. That movie was an astounding success, a true blockbuster, changing movies with how much money it made and how popular it was. Everyone went to see ET. In its original form. It made that money before Spielberg made the idiot changes he did. Not flashlights, guns. The scene when the government comes and quarantines the house was frankly frightening, it gave the scene where ET comes back much more dramatic power and importance. That's why it worked. Yet after being so overwhelmingly popular, Spielberg figured he knew better and took the guns out.
I've not seen Jaws, Dr Zhivago, The Graduate, or Grease. Other than that, I've watched all those movies, several in the theater. Because of their immense popularity, these movies are culturally significant, they help shape the US culture. You'll notice that none of these movies make a left-leaning political or ideological statement except the Graduate. The other movies that make a statement are all quite right-leaning. 10 Commandments, Ben Hur, and The Sound of Music are all unashamedly either religious or religiously friendly.
The Passion of the Christ came in higher than Revenge of the Sith. It made $428,680,800 inflation adjusted dollars, and was entirely in Aramaic and Hebrew with subtitles. No motion picture distributor or major studio would even touch it, nor would they distribute or publicize it. That says something very significant about American culture that the left and Hollywood simply don't want to hear.
When you look at adjusted earnings, the highest ranking movie made since 2000 was The Dark Knight, at number 27. It didn't even make the top 25. In fact, in the top 10, only one was made later than 1990: Titanic. Since 1980, ET is added to that list. Of the top 10, more than half were made before Star Wars in 1977. Of the top 25, 10 were made before 1970. The highest grossing film of all time was made before the US entered World War II (two of the top 10 were made before 1940). Of the top 10, none are sequels.
Oh, and look at that list. Harrison Ford was in 10 of the top 100 grossing movies of all time, adjusted for inflation. Add a couple more to that list for unadjusted movies. He's in four of the top 25. No other actor can match that feat. Harrison Ford is the biggest actor of all time, period. Yeah I liked guys like John Wayne, Gregory Peck, Cary Grant etc better, but none of them can beat Harrison Ford. I didn't even see one John Wayne movie in the top 100.Just two James Bonds movie made it on the list: Thunderball (no. 26) and Goldfinger (no. 40, a movie many consider the best of the series, although the recent Casino Royale gives it a serious run in my opinion).
To keep things in perspective, my favorite movie of all time, Casablanca, didn't even get on the top 100 list. It made a paltry $1,719,913 or about 12 million in inflation-adjusted dollars. That's around 5000th on the list.
You know what movie baffles me the most? 101 Dalmations. The animation isn't that great. The story is kind of weak. It is very funny to watch, but it isn't even in my top 10 Disney animated movies list. It's number 11 overall: I guess people like lots of puppies. Of course, the Disney movies are a bit misleading in their earnings. Snow White has made $118,328,683 of its unadjusted $184,925,486 total since 1983, according to Box Office Mojo. They re-release their movies periodically to generate more interest and money, so the totals aren't exactly what they might seem to be. Yet the movies did make that much money, even involving re-releases.
What Hollywood should be considering, and likely is aware of, is that their big movies aren't making that much money these days. The era of the huge blockbuster is passed. Sure, the numbers look gaudy; Iron Man made $582,030,528 worldwide, but it cost $140,000,000 to make. Gone With The Wind has made $400,176,459 worldwide unadjusted for inflation and it cost just $3,957,000 to make, publicize, and distribute. So Iron Man's production budget was about 26% of its worldwide earnings, and Gone With The Wind's was less than .1% (I had this at .01% in error, a commenter pointed out the error).
Here are the number one movies for the last 10 years with how they rank overall, adjusted for inflation:
2008 - The Dark Knight (27)This year it looks like the reboot of Star Trek will be the big one, although Monsters vs Aliens is making a lot of money as well.
2007 - Spider-Man 3 (93)
2006 - Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (44)
2005 - Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith (57)
2004 - Shrek 2 (30)
2003 - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (50)
2002 - Spider-Man (34)
2001 - Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (66)
2000 - How Grinch Stole Christmas (96)
1999 - Star Wars: The Phantom Menace (19)
The movies ain't makin' what they used to. Ticket prices are so high and quality is so low, stories are so weak and the endless remakes and sequels so uninteresting that viewers are tending to stay home. Would you rather see Big Budget Movie IV: Remake of Old Movie at a theater, or watch something at home from Netflix? For the price of one ticket you can get a movie every three days in your home from Netflix, and the ambiance of a theater only takes you so far. Movie Theaters are largely surviving on ads, uncreative dates and movie addicts these days. And its only going to get worse as streaming movies to your TV on demand become more prevalent and cheap.*Also check out this further analysis in a later post of what genres did well over the years!
posted by Christopher Taylor at 8:49 AM
16 Comments:
I think the best measure would be if you could take the total number of box-office tickets sold for each movie, and then make an adjustment for the total population at the time each movie was released... (if you want to get real technical, also maybe something that adjusts for the ratio of people to theater screens, if that information is avialable. Of two movies are seen by approxiamtely the same number of people, but one of them played on 1,000 screens and the other played on 10,000 screens, I think that's worth noting).
I don't really care about adding in VCR/DVD rentals or overseas sales. There is something about the theater experience that sets it apart, and something about movies as they relate to US culture that set them apart.
Interesting list though!
That would be a fascinating set of data, something I don't have time to do (but it wouldn't be that tough: population data per year and ticket sales are pretty easy to come up with). Just more work than I care to put into a blog post :) Number of screens I don't know, that might not be readily available until pretty recently.
If I had to guess, I'd suggest that the numbers wouldn't be all that different, since if there was a discrepency between percentage of population watching movies in the past and now, it would show up in ticket totals.
I think the biggest factor affecting the decline in movie earnings is that they aren't the only game in town anymore. Just like there will never be another Beatles because the music market is so diverse now, there will never be another Gone With The Wind, because we have so many more options when spending our entertainment dollar.
Mark in Portland
Further interesting thoughts:
The population of the US in 1940 was 132,164,569. Assuming a quarter per viewing, that means there were 794,705,836 viewings of Gone with the Wind - in other words, enough for every single man, woman, and child to have seen the movie six times.
If that were to happen today, that would be nearly 1.8 billion tickets sold - or 18 billion in ticket sales. Domestic only.
And if we just account for inflation of ticket prices and not dollars, Gone with the Wind would make just shy of eight billion dollars today at $10 per ticket with its original viewing numbers.
Pretty impressive, no? Certainly helps us in the modern generation get a better grip as to what a cultural phenomenon it was.
Seriously, you've NEVER seen Jaws??
You've never come across it on TV and thought "Hey, it's that shark movie. I'm gonna check it out."
Seriously?? Never?
I'd watch it if it was on some time when I had the TV on (not all that often). Maybe I should put it on Netflix.
I did listen to most of it read on NPR back when they had a reader doing popular books back in the early 70s. I listened while washing dishes.
I didn't see Star Wars until 1984, either. Just didn't get out to movies much back then, we were pretty poor and I wasn't very interested.
In 1939 there were no VCRs. If you didn't catch Gone With the Wind in the theaters during its run, you might never, in your life, have another change to see it.
Now we have a bunch of different ways to see a movie - Purchase, rent, theaters, pay-per-view. Even if you add all those channels up for a given movie I think it would be less purely as a result of reduced urgency - I don't feel any pressure to see something because I know I can see it whenever I want, even years from now.
Of course by then Greedo shoots first, but how do I know that's gonna happen?
Whenever Hollywood remakes a successful movie or a classic movie---not reboots like Star Trek or Batman, which are deliberately different films from their originals---I always think of the classic Jay Sherman line from The Critic:
"If the movie's a remake of a classic, rent the classic."
Enas Yorl, c'mon man. Everyone has a movie or movies like that. My friend--a straight man of 28---never saw any Indiana Jones movies till last year. And the Indiana Jones franchise is a Saturday night-Network-movie staple.
I'd never seen Caddyshack till I was 26 (straight male here). I feel shame.
but I'll bet you've never seen Slapshot.
There is a plethora of movies out there that everyone "should" have seen. But there's also a plethora of books everyon should read. Time and chance happen to us all...
Actually I've never seen Slapshot, either. Its one I've always wanted to see.
That's why God gave us Netflix
I'll probably do a post on this monday in greater detail, but take a look at the genres represented: Sci Fi and Fantasy themes dominate, with 9 of the top 25 movies. Granted, the Star Wars franchise is a major reason for this, but even discounting them there are more sci fi/fantasy movies in the top 25 than any other genre. I included Raiders because it is essentially fantasy.
Insightful analysis, thanks.
One minor possible error: Near the end of the piece you say GWTW cost 4 mil to make, publicize & distribute, and made $400 mil in unadjusted dollars. That would be one percent, not 0.01%. Still a tiny number by today's standards.
But math nits notwithstanding, great piece.
A possible clarification: Although there were no reliable box-office figures at the time, it is undoubtedly true that many films from the silent era made tons of money - in fact, I have seen claims that the true all-time box-office king is not "Gone With the Wind", but rather the silent film "Birth of a Nation". Granted, in the absence of real data it's hard to assign a reasonable box-office rank, but it's still a mistake to completely the early days of Hollywood.
Correction: That should be "completely OVERLOOK the early days of Hollywood."
Yeah, that's true, there's no way of knowing just how much money some of those old movies made. They were huge, bigger than anything now largely because of the novelty and the awful times: people needed an escape.
I think I know what I did on the Gone With the Wind numbers: I compared actual cost for production with the inflation-adjusted earnings.
Oh, one final note: GWTW like most old movies benefits from re-showings, it has been in the theater several times, each time earning more. So its numbers are slightly misleading (but the, Star Wars has been screened twice, too)
Interesting data. One other factor I think needs to be considered is not just the variety of entertainment options we have these days, but also the vast variety of film options we have these days. We can see just about ANY film made in the history of cinema with a click of the button on Netflix, again and again. Above and beyond that, I can go to the local movie theatre and have a choice of 20 different films to watch. I wonder, when GWTW was playing, what was it's competition? I would bet that if folks wanted to go see a movie, it was probably GWTW or nothing. Of course, for people to return to see it multiple times, it had to be good (and it is), but I just don't think the comparison is fair.
Another bit of information I'd like to know is what the TOTAL box office take is in a particular year and see how much, as a percentage of income, we are spending on cinema. Example: when I was a kid, all we had were the drive-in movie theaters. We maybe went to the movies twice a year. Now, I would bet the average family goes to the cinema probably 10 times per year.
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home