Spielberg is credited with inventing the blockbuster...but Gone With the Wind is still the best selling film of all time, right?
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Replying to @nberlat
The term Blockbuster was first used in 1943, and GWTW came in '39. I'd say it was hyperbole to suggest Spielberg invented it, and may have just meant he was very good at, or he revived big budget film making, or something.
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Replying to @obsidian_andy @nberlat
It's the business model of the "summer blockbuster", one big simultaneous wide release after building hype through TV advertising
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It's notable because the reason GwtW's record is so ridiculously high is that it's the "blockbuster" of a different kind of era Back in the day they would give GwtW a re-release every ten years, where it would top the box office each time as a "tradition"
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In its initial release in 1939 it was released as an advance-screening roadshow for like six months all over the country (charging double the normal ticket price at theaters) before its actual opening in wide release in 1940
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I mean, it's just a time period when TV didn't have nearly as much market penetration so people just went to the movie theater a lot more It was much easier to build the hype train by actually showing the movie in select theaters, and you could keep them coming back a lot easier
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Ironically GwtW running up the box-office gross score stopped in 1971, four years before Jaws created the new "summer blockbuster" model (that depended on "trans-media" coordination with TV advertising etc) GwtW's next "re-release" was finally being televised on NBC on 1976
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So you have to take these changing consumer habits into account when calculating how "popular" a movie objectively is, like no movie could possibly have a similar box office gross to GwtW today because buying tickets to movies has shrunk so much as a portion of spending generally
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Replying to @arthur_affect @obsidian_andy
sure...but it seems like that just means movies aren't as popular now, and so no movie can be as popular now, nto that somehow it's unfair to current movies to say that earlier films were more popular.
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Replying to @nberlat @obsidian_andy
Oh yeah it remains an objective truth that Gone with the Wind was more popular When you're talking about the quality of someone's work though it does mean it's a more complicated conversation
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And when I was saying that the objective popularity of a film has to be weighted by shifts in the industry I partially just mean *ways of watching a movie*, which I think most people would agree is fair
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Like we talk about Alec Guinness being horrified at the kid who'd seen Star Wars 100 times right But now it's relatively easy for some ultra-nerd to watch Star Wars *thousands* of times, and (until streaming became the norm) there was no way to really measure those viewings
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The fact that they didn't have to pay for a new ticket every time they saw it means it's fair that the box office should be weighted more than home video purchases or TV ratings when judging "how popular" a movie is but the correct value of that weighting is wildly subjective
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