Dry Ice Factory

That looks sooooooooo awesome!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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Not unless the seats are $1000 each.

You should also factor in the far cheaper ticket prices back when Gone With the Wind and The Sound of Music came out.

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This list is, in fact, adjusted for inflation, otherwise Titanic would be at the top.

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Darn you, Randy! I was just about to edit that goof out of my comment.

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Oops, I obviously should go do something else for a while!

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hal-obrien.livejournal.com

However, there's the other thing to control for, which is population.

I have a list around here... somewhere... where I did admissions per capita in the US. GWTW is the only film to sell more tickets than there were people living in the US at the time. To hit an equivalent, a movie today would have to have a domestic US gross of $2.2 billion (avg ticket price at boxofficemojo.com of $7.18 for 2009 X 307 million in the US today).

As I recall, the list isn't that radically different, but the dates point out that movies are becoming less and less popular.

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Good point. We also apparently don't have good data on grosses from the silent era. For all we know, The Birth of a Nation would rank high on this list as well.

One movie that really stuck out to me on this list was The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Its presence indicates that they're counting the midnight showings of later years too.

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mlamprey.livejournal.com

I will stand by my prophecy, and further prophesy that it will rank among the greatest and most accurate predictions of all time--second only perhaps to the prediction that the world will end in 2012.

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mlamprey.livejournal.com

This is a very useful list for any kind of performance artist who wishes to be culturally relevant. It reminds us that your Gone With the Wind jokes are going to go over a lot better than whatever you plant to do with that yam carved to look like Sergeant York.

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Yes, Sergeant York is another one I haven't seen. Although I know Gary Cooper's in it.

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I remember enjoying Sgt. York when I watched it (on TBS?) as a teenager, especially the part where he picked off the Kraut squad from back to front like a pack of wild turkeys, but I don't recall other parts of the movie now, except a vague feeling that they were pretty boring.

And yeah Gone With the Wind has alot of cultural relevance. It comes up surprisingly often when I mention I live in Georgia (although my hometown of Savannah escaped the fate of Atlanta). And when I studied in France one summer, all the foreign students seemed to have watched it :)

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I was just remembering the Carol Burnett Show parody of Gone with the Wind, which I think I saw before I'd seen the movie, although I may have read the book by that point. Anyway, I about died laughing when she makes a dress out of the curtains and leaves the curtain rods in. There's your cultural influence for you!

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I was almost literately rolling on the floor laughing when I first saw that skit too. One of the reasons I love "Angel" so much is because the writers let us know he's a big Carol Burnett Show fan.

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kalimac.livejournal.com

I was somewhat older, so the perspective may be different, but I did still find it more than passingly enjoyable when I watched it again a few years ago.

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wrdnrd

The only one of those I haven't seen is Doctor Zhivago.

WHAT. This jumps out at me simply because in looking over that list "Doctor Zhivago" was the only one (aside from "Star Wars") in the top 10 that i, personally, could care enough about to want to see again. Of those 10, i've either seen them and not cared or not cared enough to see them in the 1st place. ... Well, okay, i wouldn't object if i had to see "The Ten Commandments" again, but it's not something i'd seek out to re-watch the way i'd seek out "Star Wars" or "Doctor Zhivago."

Man, i *hate* numbers 1 and 3.

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I'm pretty sure I've seen parts of Doctor Zhivago on TV (in years past), and I used to know how to play the theme song on the piano, so it's still left some kind of imprint on me.

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Also, I hated ET the one time I saw it, which was in the theater back in the day. I liked The Sound of Music as a kid and knew all the songs.

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I must have seen The Sound of Music 20 times at least -- my grandmother kept dragging me along on its first run. When I was allowed out of hospital after my bout of bronchial pneumonia in the early 2000s, I got home to Ann just in time to watch it again on tv together.

Edited Date: 2009-07-07 11:47 pm (UTC)

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Interesting list. The only ones I haven't seen are Bells, Passion of the Christ (although it is on my DVR right now), Duel in the Sun, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and Toy Story (which I intend to watch at some point). I enjoyed most of these movies when I first saw them, but aside from the first 3 Star Wars I also don't consider any in the top 20 favorites today, although I still think the final chariot race from Ben-Hur rocks and that the Graduate makes a very interesting statement about human psychology (how we tend to want what we aren't supposed to have and then are let down after we get it). When I was younger I would have eventually watched a movie like Grinch even though I could tell it was going to be a stinker, but now I'm to the point where I just avoid most movies like that. A big part of that is because I have a DVR now and don't have to settle very often on a movie just because I haven't seen it and its on when I feel like watching a movie.

The first real favorites on my list are Ghostbusters and Butch Cassidy at 31 and 32. My four top favorites on the list are One Flew Over the Cucko's Nest, Rocky, T2 and The Best Years of Our Lives (which I'm scared to watch again because I loved it so much the only time I saw it). I'm surprised that Twister is on the list because I don't remember it being that big of a hit.

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I recently watched Duel in the Sun on DVD, and it's a total hoot. It's one of those overripe potboiler melodramas, like Flesh and the Devil, that I now find hugely entertaining. The finale is completely over the top. I'd take that movie over practically anything else on the list. It's irredeemable! (It's another David O. Selznick production, like Gone with the Wind.)

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I think it was nicknamed Lust in the Dust on its original UK release.

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kalimac.livejournal.com

I've seen 15 of the 20. Two of those 15, "E.T." and "Phantom Menace", are among the films I most hate, and I saw them both only because they were SF films by famous directors and I wanted to keep up. I wouldn't be able to declaim on how much I loathe them if I hadn't seen them, would I?

A few of the films I enjoyed, but not enough to get them on DVD. But if I were offered free copies of "The Sting" or "Fantasia" I wouldn't turn them down. I have the Broadway album of "The Sound of Music" but please, not the movie.

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I just never could get into the Sound of Music, maybe because it was one of those movies I Was Supposed To Like, but The Sting was hugely entertaining to me when it first came out (I was 9 or 10). I'm scared to watch it again because it probably hasn't aged well.

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An amusing tangent: The Box Office Mojo page actually lists Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. I looked it up on IMDb to confirm that it should be "Dwarfs". The influence of Tolkien? (Box Office Mojo also misspelled "Dalmatians," and both of these things were called to my attention by the LJ spellchecker.)

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Oops, just double-checked and it's Yglesias, not Box Office Mojo, that gets the words wrong. Actually makes more sense, since he's a notoriously bad speller.

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Coincidentally, I've seen them all at least once and all the way through -- except for Zhivago, which I've never managed to view in its entirity.

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All 100, or just the top 20?

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Just the 20, as I was responding to your first sentence. Need to check the main list next.

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kdotdammit.livejournal.com

What a BORE most of those movies are. The only one on the list that I truly like, really like, is . . . The Exorcist. Ha ha. Bean of course loves Sound of Music. Speaking of Bean, here she comes now. Gotta cut this short.

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Actually, now that you point it out, I'm kind of shocked that The Exorcist ranks that high. You know me and horror. The only way I could sit through that movie was that I saw it in college with a bunch of drunken frat boys who laughed at everything. "Hey, my head is spinning too!"

I remember reading the book, too, and not being able to sleep that night.

The rest of the list is worth checking out. As I just mentioned above, one of the more interesting films on the list lower down is The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

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