Via Matthew Yglesias, this list from Box Office Mojo:
- Gone With the Wind
- Star Wars
- The Sound of Music
- E.T.
- The Ten Commandments
- Titanic
- Jaws
- Doctor Zhivago
- The Exorcist
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
- 101 Dalmations
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Ben-Hur
- Return of the Jedi
- The Sting
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Jurassic Park
- The Graduate
- The Phantom Menace
- Fantasia
I like almost all of these movies to some degree – you have to get down to The Phantom Menace before you hit a truly terrible film (although I haven’t actually seen 101 Dalmations). The first ‘great’ film in the list is Dr Zhivago at number eight, my favorites in the list are The Exorcist and The Graduate.
I’m reminded that Pauline Kael called The Sound of Music: ‘the Sound of Money’.
There aren’t any Bollywood movies though – I suspect cultural selection bias and that Sholay and Mother India would probably slip in somewhere.
What no LotR? The evil flaming vagina of Sauron will not be pleased.
Comment by The Gisborne Harold — July 8, 2009 @ 9:58 am
Here’s why so many oldies but goodies:
Most pre-1980 pictures achieved their totals through multiple releases, especially Disney animated features which made much of their totals in the past few decades belying their original release dates in terms of adjustment. For example, Snow White has made $118,328,683 of its unadjusted $184,925,486 total since 1983.
Comment by Psycho Milt — July 8, 2009 @ 10:31 am
Milt – I don’t understand why the studios don’t do that more often. I have no interest in wasting time and money seeing Terminator 4, but if T1 or T2 were playing at the Embassy I’d be all over it.
Comment by danylmc — July 8, 2009 @ 10:48 am
The Embassy kept The Matrix on for something like a year.
I just remember a couple of Disney classics being in theatres when I was a kid, but even they seem to have stopped re-releasing.
Comment by Graeme — July 8, 2009 @ 11:21 am
There’s definitely some cultural selection bias going on here as the list refers to the American Domestic Market, not world-wide box office take.
There is no adjusted list for the world-wide box office figures.
Comment by Zoo Neeland — July 8, 2009 @ 1:28 pm
“There’s definitely some cultural selection bias going on here as the list refers to the American Domestic Market”
Obviously, or else “Snatch” would appear in the list.
Comment by Clunking Fist — July 8, 2009 @ 2:05 pm
There’s no way Snatch could make that list.
It doesn’t make the top 400 world-wide box office list (not adjusted for inflation) or even the UK list of highest grossing films either.
It did, however, do a respectable $83 million world-wide.
Should be interesting to see if Guy Ritchie can reclaim the glory of his early career with Sherlock Holmes.
Comment by Zoo Neeland — July 8, 2009 @ 2:51 pm
I agree with the cultural bias but you would also have to work out the inflation curves for each country separately and take exchange rates into account. A daunting statistical task
The international box office rose to prominence during the 80 and peaked in the late 90’s to now where you can expect that a movie will make roughly the same money overseas as it did on the domestic box office. There are Genere’s like monster movies that do very well in Japan, arty ones and comedies that do better in Europe and fantasy that does well in asia. American political movies and some of their sport ones tend to not have a big international market, although they also don’t tend to get big releases or advertising in this part of the world.
In that list you’d see all the starwars films, titanic (did half it’s gross overseas) and JP rise up the list, and probably ROTK enter it. If done on a world wide basis.
Comment by James — July 8, 2009 @ 4:24 pm
I wouldn;t call that a daunting statistical task at all. Sure, it’s a relatively big dataset, but not outside of the capabilities of a simple excel spreadsheet.
Just to satisfy the pedant in me, I’d also look to adjust for population change over time, as well as income.
Comment by Phil (not Goff) — July 8, 2009 @ 5:40 pm
“It doesn’t make the top 400″
See, people are stupid. If they weren’t, Snatch would be number 1.
Comment by Clunking Fist — July 10, 2009 @ 12:53 pm