The Burning Issue #3 - The True Box Office King???

If Avatar takes home the Best Picture award tonight it will have gone some way to replicating the success of James Cameron€™s previous narrative film Titanic. Both broke records at the Box Office and had phenomenal drop percentages during their weeks in the charts and both have used their mainstream appeal to capitalise on critical success. After all it can€™t be too big a coincidence that if Avatar wins best picture 2010 it will be one of only eight films (including Titanic) that have managed to win without being nominated for their screenplay. It is actually quite absurd when you think about it €“ a film winning best picture that can€™t even get a screenplay nomination especially when the award features two separate hand-outs for original and adapted source material. When you consider that all the other best picture winners that fit into the unnominated screenplay categories were raging box office hits it highlights the importance of being a box office smash when it comes to being nominated or winning the top prize. Really the commercial success of a film and its critical standing shouldn€™t correlate but the Academy Awards are not the Cannes Film Festival and money does matter. Anyway before I raise controversy by suggesting that spectacle films such as Avatar and Titanic belong solely in the technical categories at important awards ceremonies (L.A. Confidential€™s loss is still a sore point I must admit) it is time to focus on today€™s Burning Issue which examines which cinematic release is really the most successful of all time. Now Avatar has recently become the highest grossing US Domestic release of all time and most casual films fans thus probably assume that it is the most profitable movie ever made. This is however far from the truth and one of the reasons why the adjusted gross charts annoys me. Either use the adjusted gross system to document the weekly charts or get rid of it altogether and measure each week on ticket sales rather than profits made. After all no-one is out there calculating how much money Michael Jackson's album Thriller made, we just know that it sold around 50 million copies and is therefore indisputably the best selling record of all time. Hence one of the reasons why I found the hype surrounding Avatar chasing Titanic in the Box Office Records quite irritating is because it was a chase surrounding meaningless dollars. The highest grossing slogan is a marketing term which actually says very little in terms of detailed economic analysis. The fact that the box office charts are measured on gross complicates the system when trying to find out the true worldwide no 1 film of all time because inflation is always changing in different ways in a number of different countries. Again if ticket sales were just calculated there wouldn€™t be this problem. That said then, I have had to base the statistics on the US Domestic Adjusted Scale. With this chart taken into account Avatar€™s seven hundred and a half million dollars still only rounds out a top fifteen place on the American all time adjusted charts and it is very unlikely to get any further than the top ten by the time its run its finished. Therefore on a domestic scale at least it is a long way off being the most profitable film of all time. To give you a quick example of how much the ticket sales have changed then put these following statistics into perspective. In 1997, at the time of Titanic's release it would have cost cinemagoers on average $4.59 to buy a ticket in comparison to today€™s average which is around $7.50 €“ a big difference indeed. When these stats are weighed in Avatar is some 250-300 million dollars behind Cameron's previous record breaking behemoth. Not that Titanic is particularly close to being number one either. There are actually five films ahead of the 1997 best picture winner on the adjusted scale which include from fifth place to first: The Ten Commandments, Extra Terrestrial, The Sound of Music, Star Wars and Gone With the Wind. Three of those films however featured multiple theatrical releases which enabled them to make further profit from both nostalgia and from a renewed interest amongst the modern audiences of the time. Gone With the Wind for example has been re-released in the USA on no less than seven occasions though it is interesting to note that on its original release it made almost twenty times the amount of its nearest box office rival The Wizard of Ozon US Theatrical Rentals. This is an amazing statistic even if you reflect on the fact that there were nowhere near as many cinematic releases during this time period.

Another interesting variable to consider is that the population of America during the thirties (the time of Gone with the Wind€™s release) was only 123,188,000 - practically two and a half times less of what it is today. Given that the film made $189,523,031 on its original run it works out that on average every single person in America watched the film roughly four and a half times. Of course with fewer films on offer there would have been more frequent visits to the same films but it€™s still pretty amazing though when you think that a phenomenon like Titanic was only seen by 138 million cinemagoers by comparison. But this is where the debate really becomes quite inconclusive. On a purely statistical basis Gone With the Wind is the most successful cinematic release of all time given its adjusted gross and the staggering amount of the population that went to watch the film. Gone with the Wind however has history on its side as what the adjusted scale can not determine is how some of today€™s film might have fared in the less competitive and less televison-dominant market of 1939. The Sound of Music for example may be half a million dollars behind Gone with the Wind on the adjusted scale but it featured no subsequent re-releases and was released in 1965 when far more films were being made - for those requiring the exact stats - 1,521, films were made in 1939 compared to the 2,437, that hit the screens in 1965. Regardless however the debate of time and circumstance is a whole other kettle of fish that is not really worth delving into in this moment of time. As you can see I have clearly put way too much thought into it all, so I€™ll leave the debate up to you before I have time to come up with any more theories. Meanwhile I'm hoping that The Hurt Lockercan repeat its success at the Baftas which would funnily enough make it the lowest grossing film in over half a century to have taken home the Academy's Top honour. Unfortunately however I don't think that stat will work in the film's favour.