Forget ticket sales. What movie has actually been seen by the most people ever? Gone with the Wind? * Star Wars*? Some Chinese propaganda film? A Bollywood spectacle most Americans have never heard of?
WikiAnswers says Jesus.
IMDb doesn’t disagree, but hedges a bit.
Personally, I’m can’t believe it’s not Gone with the Wind.
From that imdb listing:
Gotta hand it to them scriptwriters!
The Wizard of Oz has got to be up there. Titanic would be too in more modern times. The only problem with Gone With the Wind is that it is LONG although still a great movie. That introduces the question if watching only part of the movie counts.
I’d bet you that the majority of people under thirty have never seen Gone with the Wind. Particularly if you include everywhere outside of the United States. I’ve never even heard of a film called Jesus.
I think the Wizard of Oz or even It’s a Wonderful Life has had more total viewings, but the most viewed film is not necessarily the film viewed by the most people.
It claims to have the most viewings, but that’s somewhat different then the most people having seen it.
Here’s an article about the Jesus film. It doesn’t seem impossible that it’s the most watched movie of all time, but the people promoting it also seem to be pulling numbers out of their butts, so its hard to tell.
I’ll guess Titanic, there are a lot more people around now then there was when Gone With the Wind was popular, and also I get the impression that the distribution of English language films had gotten a lot better since then.
What about some Disney film? Classics like Dumbo or Snow White have been around for decades and have played all over the world.
I was going to vote for Wizard because of it’s annual network appearances starting in the 50’s, but Nemo makes a valid point. Disney would rerelease his films for a new generation every 7 years or so, before DVD’s.
I had never heard of it either until this thread and I was born years before it was released. This is the time to break out the :dubious: for the claim that it is the most watched movie of all time. If so many people are watching it, they sure hid it well from me and everyone I know.
Well, if your not a heathen living in a mud-hut in East Swaziland, your probably not the target demographic. It’s apparently been used as a tool for missionaries in foreign countries for the last 30 some-odd years. And while I’m skeptical of their viewing figures, they apparently do have a sizable infrastructure for translating the film, screening it in remote countries and handing out free copies. So their claim of it as the most watched movie is at least semi-plausible.
To be honest, I am going to say some silent movie - some of them went all over the world and were projected for freaking years, all you needed was a hand crank generator and a flat sheet hung from a tree to amuse a tribe in africa, or new guinea, or some atoll in the south pacific … probably a cecil b demille epic, or perhaps a keystone cops type comedy. I can remember reading reports of some of the first nickelodeans, people would literally go see the same little 5 minute flick dozens of times because it was so new and different. Multiply that by the populations of the major cities, the small towns and the rest f the world…and now with DVDs, people are watching Charlie Chaplin and the Keystone Cops again. [actually, i have a buddy with a reel of 3 or 4 silent shorts spliced together that he got from a grandfather who bought them back in the day when he owned a theater, they were favorites of his grandmother so who knows who owns what that has been lost track of!]
Almost certainly it is The Sound of Music - more than one billion people have seen it. Third highest gross adjusted for ticket price and more globally televised than GWTW or Star Wars.
I think this is a contender Let's All Go to the Lobby - Wikipedia
Titanic sold a lot of tickets, but a lot of them were to teenage girls seeing it for the third or fourth time, not new viewers. Even so, it was considered remarkable when Titanic surpassed Gone With the Wind’s inflation-adjusted box office gross.
Considering that old classic movies tend to get rented a lot, and that one rental could be an entire family of viewers, I’d reckon that old movies would would have a distinct edge in this matter.
It’s possible it’s one of the more popular Bollywood films, which are seen by the billion-plus people in India, as well as those in Russia, the Middle East and Africa.
I would venture Casablanca with no evidence.
Titanic never passed Gone With the Wind’s inflation-adjusted box office gross. No movie will ever pass GWTW’s inflation-adjusted box office gross. In today’s dollars, GWTW made like a billion dollars.
Excuse me, $1.45 billiion.
But my totally uneducated guess would have to be Star Wars. It just seems like a movie that everyone sees once and I imagine it’s pretty popular worldwide too.
I would also guess a classic Disney animated film, since they have global reach and appeal, cross multiple generations, benefitted from large penetration of foreign markets as well as regular redistribution every decade or so (pre-home video era).
The Top 10 Disney films using the same adjusted numbers (w/their total ranking in parentheses):
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (#10)
- 101 Dalmatians (#11)
- Fantasia (#20)
- The Lion King (#24)
- The Jungle Book (#28)
- Sleeping Beauty (#29)
- Pinocchio (#37)
- Bambi (#46)
- Finding Nemo (#64)
- Lady and the Tramp (#67)
And this is just the domestic gross. Add on foreign releases and home video/DVD sales over the years (something Disney exploited from their earliest incarnations), and you have a lot of viewers. Given that #1 is also the oldest of these (followed closely by #3, 7 & 8), my guess would go to that film.
If you count repeat viewings, Rocky Horror could be in the running. According to IMDB, it has been screened continuously since 1975.
Except, of course, Austrians . . . most of whom have never seen it, and many of whom have never even heard of it.