Top 10 US Films of All-Time

I'll take your "of course not there is no data" as a no I don't have any facts to support the supposition. Thank you for the answer.

 

It took you two weeks to come back with that note?

 

And your point is? How does the length of time it takes me to respond to something have anything to do with the legitimacy or accuracy of my post? It's obvious to anyone reading this thread that once you answered what I asked, your supposition about Titanic and it's box office had no facts to support it. As such your supposition is NOT a fact. The only thing that is fact is that Titanic appears as #1 on the list that is linked in the beginning of this thread. That is all.

 

My point is that it's lame to let a thread idle for two weeks and then come back to snipe at someone.

As for my "supposition" has facts to support it, you can't claim absolutely it doesn't. I don't have the numbers in my hand to establish what groups saw "Titanic" the most, and they may not exist. Or maybe they do, but just because I don't have the information doesn't mean it's not out there.

Even if this IS all just my "supposition", you seem to imply that because I can't prove my case that it then proves the opposite - ie, because I can't show beyond a shadow of a doubt that "Titanic" wasn't a hit just because of teen girls that this then makes the opposite true. It doesn't - any arguments that teen girls are the reason for the film's success are also suppositions, and ones with much less backing.

I still don't understand why it seems to bother some people so much that "Titanic" was a huge hit - attempts to marginalize its popularity make no sense to me...

 

Oatsdad, I would have to agree with you on this one. When a movie breaks out to Titanic's level it just can't be driven by a single demographic group. It would be just as unfair to say the Lord Of The Rings or the Matrix were only liked by teenage boys. When movies get into the hundreds of millions of dollars range they have to have a fairly broad appeal.

 

It's funny, I just did a quick web search on Titanic and many of the people criticizing the film on-line appear to be Star Wars fans genuinely upset that it outgrossed The Phantom Menance - which in their minds (often prior to having actually seen TPM) *should* have been the biggest/best film of all time.

 

all I know is I saw Titanic 3 times in a theater and I'm not a teenager anymore.

plus during those 3x, I didn't see many teenagers.

 

Interesting that you didn't deny being a girl!

 

What blows my mind is that Titanic made ALMOST double what the number ten film made. Not quite, but wild anyway.

I wonder what impact the film's length had on it's financial take? Being three plus hours it had to have less daily screenings than a two hour flick, therefore less tickets per screen per day. No?

-BZync

 

But leisure time and discretionary income have increased substantially since the era of GONE WITH THE WIND or, especially, BIRTH OF A NATION.

 

Yes, but that becomes irrelevant in the long haul. That factor would limit the film from having a huge result in a certain short-term period, like the opening weekend, but there's no reason it'd affect the overall gross. Obviously it didn't hurt "Titanic"!

 

Interesting thread, and interesting issue here.

As a ratio of total population, movie attendance peak year historically was 1946.

Depending on how you define "leisure time," it's an iffy proposition. A "simpler" life then, meant the average American actually had fewer distractions (previously mentioned here, i.e., less competition for free time, even if there was less "free time" in pure numbers.

I'd guess "more discretionary income" would be questionable as well. The bottom-line, so to speak, would be how the various eras compare with regard to movie admission/household income/cost of living. People didn't make a lot in 1946, but movies and things in general didn't cost much either. (Same would hold for GWTW & BOAN eras.)

It's not worth hiring the economists to run the numbers, but it may well be that more of the population, by ratio, had more discretionary dollars then vs. today. And maybe not.

The Wall Street Journal had an interesting article related to all this a couple months ago, laying out the fact that at some specific point, I think in the late 60's, there was some change in the ratings system that opened up the market for "racier" movies-----and attendance, virtually over night, dropped by something like 35% and has never recovered.
(The numbers took into account box office inflation.) The article pretty much laid the blame at "Godless/valueless" Hollywood, though not in so many words.

I was highly suspect of the story, smelling a "family values" ax to grind behind it, but never fully figured it out.

doug

 

I found the numbers for Titanic.

I wouldn't call it a "chick flick". But women definitely loved it.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/ratings#reports

Some highlights:

Males, on average, rated it 6.8.
Females, on average, rated it 7.2.
Females, under the age of 18, gave it a whopping 8.1.
Males, under 18, gave it a 7.0.

I wasn't so incorrect in my assumptions, after all!