FANTASTIC!

"I solemnly swear that I am up to no good"

Last week I pulled the numbers for best selling movies over the years and looked at how the list looked when adjusted for inflation. For example, the top grossing movie of all time in raw dollars is Titanic, but when the box office take is adjusted for inflation it actually ends up being Gone With the Wind.

The list was interesting and it got a lot of attention (especially from Ace of Spades HQ, thanks guys!) but there was one more thing I wanted to analyze about the list. Here is the inflation adjusted top 50 list of all time selling movies, this time color coded for different genres. Here is the key for what colors stand for which genres:

Action Adventure
Comedy
Crime
Drama
Fantasy
Historical
Horror
Musical
Mystery/Suspense
Science Fiction
Western

And here is the annotated list:

1. Gone With The Wind
2. Star Wars
3. The Sound of Music
4. ET: The Extra-Terrestrial
5. The Ten Commandments
6. Titanic
7. Jaws
8. Dr Zhivago
9. The Exorcist
10. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
11. 101 Dalmatians
12. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back
13. Ben-Hur
14. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi
15. The Sting
16. Raiders of the Lost Ark
17. Jurassic Park
18. The Graduate
19. Star Wars: The Phantom Menace
20. Fantasia
21. The Godfather
22. Forest Gump
23. Mary Poppins
24. The Lion King
25. Grease
26. Thunderball
27. The Dark Knight
28. The Jungle Book
29. Sleeping Beauty
30. Shrek 2
31. Ghostbusters
32. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
33. Love Story
34. Spider-Man
35. Independence Day
36. Home Alone
37. Pinnochio
38. Cleopatra (1963)
39. Beverly Hills Cop
40. Goldfinger
41. Airport
42. American Graffiti
43. The Robe (1953)
    
44. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
45. Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
46. Bambi
47. Blazing Saddles
48. Batman (1989)
49. The Bells of St. Mary's
50. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King
    

Take a look at that list. Granted, many of these cross genres (is Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure or historical, comedy or fantasy?) so I took the most broad and primary genre for each one. Some were tough to really call. Is the Lion King a musical, a drama? All those Disney animated movies are fantasy in some sense, and musical in another. So some of these choices are pretty subjective.

Yet look that over if you will. Six of the top 25 movies are science fiction. Of the top 50 overall, seven are sci-fi. For a genre that gets no respect, that's a pretty good showing. If you add in the 8 Fantasy movies (four in the top 25) that cross genre of science fiction/fantasy which is generally viewed with contempt by academics and literati did very well. Historical movies which tend to win academy awards did no better than Fantasy in the top 25 and had fewer major hits in the top 50.

And what's the genre you most associate with huge box office money? The genre that is considered a blockbuster every time? Action/Adventure. Look over that list at the bright red names. One in the top 25. Eight overall, the same as fantasy. Yet that's the genre automatically presumed to be a big seller: action adventure movies, makes big money! Except... it doesn't really.

Now, I understand that sci fi and fantasy are hard to do. They take a lot of money to produce, they are heavily weighted toward the Star Wars movies (4 in the top 25), so the genre might not be as popular as it seems initially. Fantasy is tough to do because it is difficult to present seriously, its too easy to mock with its silly themes of magic and elves and what have you.

You know what doesn't make a very big showing, yet Hollywood keeps trying over and over and over to push at us? Musicals. There are two pure musicals in the list and one could more properly be placed as a Historical drama (Sound of Music). The last big musical to come out was Chicago which doesn't even break the top 100 even without adjusting it for inflation. The High School Musical series made even less (although they were fairly cheap to produce).

The genre that got the most hits on the top 50 list by my calculations is Drama, which is no surprise. That is kind of a catch-all genre, most movies are dramas, and almost all of them can fit into a different sub-category such as comedy, musical, western, etc.

I just thought it was pretty interesting to see how many fantasy and sci fi movies did so very well, considering how few are really made - especially fantasy. If you look at the unadjusted totals, fantasy does even better, by adding in the rest of the Lord of the Rings series, all of the Harry Potter books, and several others such as Narnia and Night at the Movies. If you consider the comic book movies to be fantasy rather than action/adventure (which is a reasonable judgement) that total goes up even higher.

So maybe Science Fiction, which has given us movies such as Blade Runner and 2001 ought to be given a little more respect. Certainly fantasy is coming into its own now with the power of CGI to bring previously impossible or poorly done effects to the screen with the power that their original media requires.