Cinematical

It wasn't so long ago that breaking $100 million at the box office was a big deal. Now, according to boxofficemojo.com, there have been 351 movies to pull off this feat, several of them in current release: The Devil Wears Prada, Mission: Impossible III, Click, Talladega Nights, Superman Returns, The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, Cars and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. The last four cracked the all-time top 100.

Incidentally, of the top 351, 70 films have broken $200 million, 22 films have broken $300 million, 7 films have broken $400 million (Dead Man's Chest is one of them), and only one -- Titanic -- has reached $600 million.

Back in the 1970s, when the Blockbuster was first invented, or at least when the phrase was coined, such figures were the stuff of science fiction. I have a list published in Variety in January of 1977, ranking the top 200 highest-grossing films of all time, up to that point (pre-Star Wars). Jaws had been released 18 months earlier, and was the first film to break $100 million. After that, we had The Godfather with $85 million, The Exorcist with $82 million, The Sound of Music with $78 million and Gone with the Wind at $72 million. The Graduate rounds out the top ten with a whopping $50 million gross. After that it tapers off quite a bit. The Godfather Part II comes in at number 26 with a $29 million gross. The most successful James Bond film at that time was Thunderball, with $28 million. The list finishes off with a three-way tie (On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Thunderbolt and Lightfoot and Barry Lyndon), each with a whopping $9.1 million gross -- an outright flop in today's market. (Some of these movies have improved their tallies during subsequent re-releases.)

I've heard of inflation, but ... you know.

I think we've got some serious book-cooking going on here. For example, how many people really prefer Dead Man's Chest to The Curse of the Black Pearl? I would wager you'd be hard-pressed to find one in any given hundred souls. The original was inspired and the sequel very definitely uninspired. Yet the sequel has outgrossed the original by more than $100 million.

To me, the movie business has become like pro-wrestling. The game is fixed. What no one tells you is that The Curse of the Black Pearl opened on 3416 screens, while Dead Man's Chest opened on 4133 screens. They're pitting welterweights against heavyweights without saying anything about it.

Certainly these movies are popular, but I want to see an accurate reading of just how popular. I want to see per-screen average lists, and I want to see "adjusted for inflation" lists. Adjusted for inflation, boxofficemojo.com argues that Gone with the Wind is still number one, followed by Star Wars, The Sound of Music, E.T., The Ten Commandments and then Titanic. That list has a more historical perspective; it also takes into account re-releases, which demonstrates the timelessness of certain films. It also considers tastes and audiences of the past, who were just as excited about movies as we are today.

While I'm griping, let me say a few words about documentaries. It's a given that digital video contributed to the recent success of documentaries, but also there have been some very good documentaries that have captured the public interest. Unfortunately, more documentaries have come along trying to do the same thing, and we're getting a bunch of copies, paler and paler. There are at least a dozen currently lingering in theaters.

The thing that bugs me most of all is the sheer volume of documentaries that follow that same, tired PBS format: talking head, clip, talking head, clip, narrator. Bleh. Even the highly-touted, upcoming The U.S. vs. John Lennon does that.

Here's another example: I enjoyed Wordplay (35 screens) much better when it was called Word Wars and told the story of the Scrabble competition. And how many Iraq documentaries have come out this year? I stopped counting about the same time I stopped going.

Frankly, the best war documentary I've seen lately isn't about Iraq at all, but still contains eerie echoes. Winter Soldier was made by a then-unnamed collective of filmmakers (including future Oscar winner Barbara Kopple), filming soldiers who had returned from Vietnam, revealing their harrowing tales of atrocities at a press conference. The film was buried for years, but Milestone Films resurrected it for a 2005 theatrical release and a 2006 DVD release.