My Two Cents - Top Grossing Movies

Titanic. The Dark Knight. Star Wars. What do these three movies all have in common? Simple...combined, they grossed over one and a half billion dollars at the United States box offices. One and a half billion. And that was just at movie theaters in this country. A better question is - how? Why? What determines if a movie is going to be a box-office smash, or an absolute bomb? If there was a simple answer to that question, Hollywood would be turning out billion-dollar megablockbusters by the truckload. Since they aren't...here's my take on it:

First and foremost, it doesn't hurt that these were three exceptional films. Often, there is a great deal of hype surrounding them...and most of that hype occurs when the movie is already released (the classic "word of mouth"). Unlike most movies, where the hype machine revs up months in advance. Also...most of these movies transcend simple genre descriptions. There is a little bit of something for everyone.

But, in the end...it's an intangible. Sometimes, a movie comes along...and it is just a smash. Consider that in 1977, "Star Wars" was the highest grossing movie in US box office history. It took twenty years before "Titanic" took the crown. And it was another eleven before "Dark Knight" joined the exclusive club of highest grossing movies. In the history of Hollywood, only eight movies have grossed over four hundred million at the US box office: Titanic, Dark Knight, Star Wars, Shrek 2, E.T., Star Wars Episode One - The Phantom Menace, Pirates Of The Caribbean - Dead Man's Chest, and Spider-Man. Eight movies in over eighty years...that's pretty exclusive company.

Will there ever be a movie that out-grosses Titanic? It's impossible to say for certain. Surely no one ever thought Star Wars would be outgrossed. Not only was it outgrossed...but it was outgrossed by over one hundred and forty million dollars. And eleven years after it was outgrossed by Titanic...Dark Knight outgrossed it by seventy-three million. It will take an extraordinary set of circumstances to break Titanic's stranglehold on the top spot. But if life has taught us nothing else...it is that records are made to be broken.

But, that's just my opinion...