Animation in foreign venues, starting with a well-known hybrid:
Avatar rolled up an overseas cume through Sunday of $1.288 billion, exceeding by $46 million "Titanic's" 13-year international boxoffice record of $1.242 billion.
In third place was Fox's family-oriented "Alvin and the Chipmunks: the Squeakquel," which garnered $11.6 million from 5,017 screens in 60 markets for a foreign cume of $175 million. ...
Still champ is "Gone with the Wind," which grossed $400 million worldwide in 1939, now worth at least $6 trillion in today's dollars.
Yes, indeedy. $6 trillion. And that doesn't even include DVDs. Let's hear it for the magic of inflation and compounding ...
I anticipate that we'll soon be seeing a spate of big-budget 3-D epics designed to cash in on that James Cameron magic. This will be much like the spate of hand-drawn features that cropped up to cash in on that Aladdin-Lion King magic all those many years ago.
And the new pretenders to the throne will probably meet with the same kind of success that Titan A. E. and Quest for Camelot did. (Then again, maybe I'm being a smidge too cynical.)
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On the up side, it would mean more jobs for VFX artists until the enthusiasm for big-budget 3D epics runs out.
Unless you adjust for inflation, box office receipt records are misleading. It's like saying that my house is better than the house up the street because I paid $500,000 for it in 2008 and the other house sold for $495,000 in 1982. Gone with the Wind is still the box office king with Titanic at #6. Avatar is only working it's way into the top 25. Impressive, to be sure, but it has a long way to go.
Sorry, that's just not possible that it could be six-trillion.
If Selznick and MGM made six trillion dollars from that movie, they would have been richer than JP Morgan, Getty, Carnegie, Hearst, combined.
Someone did their math wrong. Box office mojo puts it at 1.4 billion domestic adjusted.
That's like double Avatar.
Looks like they got their math wrong. 400 million worldwide makes 6 billion adjusted.
Don't their interior "bullshit" alarms go off when they try to imagine a film making trillions of dollars?
I think at some point, someone, a writer or an editor would look up from the screen and go "wait a second... that doesn't sound right. Where's my calculator?"
Avatar is a better movie than Gone with the Wind.
There. I said it.
Avatar should be at the top of the list of the most overrated movies of all time. The script is barely 1D.
Yeah, but Gone with the Wind is overrated even more by a factor of a trillion to one.
Gone With the Wind is good up to the point where Rhett Butler tells Scarlett O'Hara that her husband Frank is "lying out on DeCatur Road with a bullet in his head."
After that it turns into Soap Opera. Spiffy Soap Opera, but Soap Opera nevertheless.
And I should have noted that the $6 trillion sounded fishy.
Looks like THR has fixed the article to read billion now.
I agree with Steve about when GWTW jumps the shark.
So many melodramatic tragedies strain the audience interest past the stretching point.
And you know what? The Jazz Singer isn't even the best movie of 1927, nor did it win Best Picture.
Abel Ganz's Napoleon premiered, as did Friz Lang's Metropolis. Best Picture went to Wings.
But the Jazz Singer had the most effect on the future of cinema.
So many melodramatic tragedies strain the audience interest past the stretching point
Yes. But it was a very high-gross stretching point, almost triple the previous official record holder, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
Gone with the Wind is a FAR superior film to avatar. It's better written, better acted, and more beautiful to look at.
And with all the dvd and TV sales of Gone With The Wind, it's also made billions. avatar is not as universal as Gone with the Wind and it will quickly be forgotten as a film. It didn't break much new ground (nothing in it that hasn't been done better in other, better films).
Cameron can't hold a candle to Selznick.
"Gone with the Wind is a FAR superior film to avatar. It's better written, better acted, and more beautiful to look at."
opinions are not facts. Avatar is all eye candy, sure, but it's GWTW that cannot hold a candle to Avatar in the visuals department.
rufus
Pleeeease.... i wish audiences cared more about substance than eye candy. ridiculous!!!
An Alfred Hitchcock film or a Gone with the wind doesn't stand a chance with the dumbed down audiences of today. They care more about repeatedly spending their hard earned 15 dollars, or more, per ticket just to see effects for 3 hours on an imax screen.
The world does need consumers.
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