I got that idea from your statement:
If I got the wrong impression, I’m sorry. It’s just that you made it sound like going to a movie was a special event done only a few times a year.
Carry on.
Data point: My home town (probably about 5000 in those days) had one theater.
One other aspect about GWTW would be to look at it in terms of the disposable income people had. The stock market had crashed ten years earlier. We were recovering but then had the recession of 1937. I imagine people were still skittish about spending.
My mom said a lot of people went because they couldn’t believe Rhett was really going to deliver “that line.” She would have been 15 at the time and probably didn’t see it until re-release.
In fact in the recently released Public Enemies the point is made,correctly I believe, that John Dillinger’s primary reason for going to the Biograph was to escape the heat in the cooled cinema.
Another complication with inflation adjusted figures is that in 1939 the average movie was cheaper to attend, in real terms, than they are today because the rise in ticket prices has far outstripped the rise in the CPI.
I think the original premise is flawed. Yes there are plenty of competing entertainments around, and there might be some validity if we were talking of a once off event where a person may not be able to attend at that time as they are doing whatever. However pictures are shown numerous times and people can make time to see a movie (Titanic for instance). Plus, of course, there is far more leisure time available these days and transport is a lot easier. Not to mention disposable income.
If Gone with the Wind is so great, where is the co-release of the game exclusive to the X-BOX? Is there Gone with Wind cereal? Is there a GWTW t-shirt? Does Universal Studios Florida have a Gone with the Wind roller coaster?
Gone with the Wind HA!
There was a ride at the shortlived Selznick Studio Theme Park (it was in the back of the Disney Store at the West Edmonton Mall) but after too many tourists caught on fire during the Escape from Atlanta part the insurance got excessive. And of course having to find a newborn baby for the back of each car, while it added authenticity, got prohibitively expensive.
As the only surviving major cast member Olivia de Havilland was approached to do voice work for the X-Box game but kept going off book. It was bad enough that it was now Melanie who greets the Yankee soldier with the sword before Scarlett brings the gun, but when she went off book when responding to “What’s in your hand?” with “Say ‘what’s’ again motherfucker!” they couldn’t let it slide even for a 92 year old legend.
Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a Damn!
I love the Gone With the Wind game, burning down the town is the best way to kill as many of the zombies as possible.
But the South will always rise again.
Just out of curiosity, where is this town? My parents, who were the data source for my answer, grew up in the Pacific Northwest. During the early 40’s, my father lived in Lewiston, Idahowhich, at the time, had a population of 10,500 and three movie theaters (there was also a fourth one across the river in Clarkston, WA which then had about 2,000 people). My mother lived for a few years in Onalaska, WAwhich probably didn’t even have 500 people but did have a movie theater.
This puts an end to the discussion immediately. As pointed out, the population of the U.S. was a third the size it is today. For a film of that era to compete in any way with modern audience size is a phenomenon that can’t be put aside.
This is flatly wrong. Movie going was the premier entertainment. Estimates place the number of visits as 80,000,000 weekly, a number that has never been remotely approached since the 1930s. People routinely went to movies twice or more a week.
While that reinforces your contention that there were far fewer non-movie competitors for attention, the flip side is that it made it much harder for an expensive, extra-long event movie like GWTW to stand out.
You also probably don’t know movie theater history. In those days studios owned their own movie chains. Movies were licensed to perform in these theaters only, at least for first run sites in major cities. You did not have your pick of 50 theaters in the metro area. You went to the super-deluxe movie palace downtown. Period. These were huge, 2-5,000 seat monstrosities with uniformed ushers, hence the much higher ticket prices. Even so, there were only 14 showings a week of a movie this long. A modern blockbuster can easily have 500 showings a week in a large metro area. The theaters would be smaller, 500-1000 seats for the largest at a multiplex, but at a quick average they can accommodate 10 times as many people per week.
That meant that a movie had to stay available for lengthy amount of time to reach comparable ticket sales. I don’t know how long GWTW played offhand, but I remember The Sound of Music stayed in the same local theater for over a year when it came out. Nothing like that can happen today. And nothing like that happened with more ordinary films back then. A phenomenon is a phenomenon and that transcends era.
The re-releases are not a hugely significant percentage of the total. And far more modern films, like Star Wars, also get a boost from re-releases. They are standard in the history of the inflation-adjusted top films so you can’t single any one film out for this.
Yes, it truly does. You can’t very well compare the grosses of a 2009 film with those of a 1999 film. The inflation in ticket prices and ticket availability already make the two into two eras. Any film that competes from before the Jaws blockbuster era has greater claim to be a true film champion than anything put out today.
Yes, but a 50% share isn’t quite as impressive when you’ve essentially got only 3 networks (sure, there were UHF/syndicated stations, but they had pretty much zero original content, and didn’t count for much in the ratings) which you’d expect to average a 30-something% share anyway. An epic movie/miniseries back then would have been expected to perform better than sitcom reruns, I’d imagine. Not to say the numbers for the television airing of GWTW weren’t good, but it’s hard to compare it to today, with cable, DVD, On Demand, etc.
Right 1/3 the population but about 1/100th of the competition from other forms of entertainment.
No actually it’s 100% correct. X-Boxes, Digital Cable, the Internet and Disneyland did not yet exist then. Even if there were 700+ movies in 1939 if people went to see them twice a week they could see 1/7th of all the movies made per year, it’s only a number game that one of those would be Gone With the Wind.
I don’t see how that follows at all.
I did know that actually. It’s one of the reasons why we have the strange system of distribution that we have today. As for your demography, that might be sort of true, but there are very few metro areas that have 50 theaters or more even today. Theaters are still huge monstrosities with more than a thousand seats in a big city. They still have uniformed ushers, though the service might be not as good as it was then.
Gone With the Wind was released several times. But you’re right, it was a different dynamic, which is the point of this thread.
Not according to some of the previous posters above who contend that people didn’t really see Gone With the Wind en masse until the second release. And yes, Star Wars did get a boost from re-releases, it also was released prior to cable, x-box, and the internet.
I disagree for all the reasons I’ve already stated.
While it wasn’t in theaters for a year, The Dark Knight was shown in first run theaters continuously up through the movie’s release on DVD. As you say, a phenomenon is a phenomenon and if The Dark Knight was released earlier in the year, it likely would have shattered Titanic’s take and possibly challenged GWTW.
Rural Illinois. Heck, we didn’t even get a McDonald’s until 1980 or so :rolleyes:
I continue to disagree with you but we’ve staked out different positions on something that is only an opinion.
However, one factual statement can be made. I should have used screens rather than theaters. Most multiplexes today will run a major summer blockbuster on 3, 4, even 5 or 6 screens simultaneously. Screens are the real core number for today’s releases. And that means that a movie can easily appear on 50 screens in a metro area.
Even so, theaters is not completely wrong. Fandango indeed lists 50 separate theaters when I enter Inglourious Basterds into New York City and many are running multiple screenings, so I would guess the total number of screens is over 100, without any listings for Westchester County or Connecticut. That would push the metro total up over 150.
Most metro areas will have fewer, of course. 50 is still a reasonable number. They are smaller, true, which is why I estimated 10 times the capacity. But also more expensive, probably 8 to 10 times as much. Weekend grosses could be expected to be 100 times as high today as in 1939. Inglourious Basterds made $37.6 million, a moderate success for a blockbuster. The comparable figure for 1939 would have been $376,000. How do you get that to hundreds of millions? You can’t. That GWTW did is beyond extraordinary. GWTW made $189 million in its first release. The re-releases are negligible.
I continue to disagree because I think the facts are against you. GWTW is an aberration of historic proportion, no matter what the media landscape of the time was like.
Well obviously there are several factors that make it impossible to directly compare movie success outside of a narrow time period. Inflation is one of them, not the only one, and not completely unmitigated by other factors, but still an important and real one. Another is obviously that films used to get a much longer run than they do now. Add in do you count things like DVD sales, pay per view, rental, etc.
This won’t mitigate all factors of course, but I always thought that at the very least you should start with comparing number of tickets sold rather than how much “money” the movie made.
One interesting thing to do would be to compare GWTW vs. an “average successful movie” from its time, and then compare (say) Titanic to an “average successful movie”. That is, how much of an outlier on the bell curve was it? How did GWTW do vs. a movie in the 80th percentile of total revenue?
Exapno Mapcase Your point about screens is well taken, but as far as theaters in New York go. If you put in the zip code 10001 you’ll get theaters in New Jersey by the fifth page. It looks to be about 5 theaters per page, so you’re already moving out. But again New York is well New York. I didn’t say it was unheard of to have that many theaters in a city, New York certainly has more than that, but I bet the number of theaters drops precipitously when you get below the top 10 cities. Phoenix only has 27 theaters for instance. So yeah, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, San Francisco, Dallas, and Miami have more than 50 theaters but beyond that?
From the February 8th, 1940 Wall St. Journal–