doodledee

You ever notice how the Top Grossing Movies of All Time are always the newer ones? And how the records are always being broken and stuff?

Here's the current top 12:

1. Titanic (1997)
2. Star Wars (1977)
3. Shrek 2 (2004)
4. E.T. (1982)
5. Star Wars Episode 1 : Jar Jar's Revenge (1999)
6. Spider Man (2002)
7. Lord of the Rings : Return of the King (2003)
8. Spider Man 2 (2004)
9. The Passion of the Christ (2004)
10. Jurassic Park (1993)
11. Lord of the Rings : The Two Towers (2002)
12. Finding Nemo (2003)

(I did 12 because the last two were newer. Stesticle wizard am I!)

Ok, I guess maybe records aren't being broken all the time, but you get my point: the list means nothing beyond what it endeavors to say, which is "check it out! this movie over here made a ton of effing money!" It doesn't mean "this movie was the number 8 movie of all time!" The list really has more to do with ticket prices and number of screens and the price of a box of junior mints and the fact that old people haven't figured out how to download movies of the internet yet.

But I'm sure people point to the Big Money List and conclude that the movies that are on the list must rule because they made (or are making) so much money and that means tons of people have seen them and tons of people can't *all* be wrong, so it's gotta be mint it's just gotta! And if you'd argue that "people" don't necessarily do it, then screw off and at least admit that the advertising genius sure do. And the media plays right along. Look at the way the weekend box office takes are reported in the paper and analyzed in the news and in way, way too many "blogs". It's some sort of fake sport or something, only instead of being for 'normal' people it's for 'dorks' who think that a 3 day haul of $35MM for some stupes sci-fi movie is somehow worth digging into. Not for me, thanks.

What triggered me thinking about this was a sidebar in USA Today that listed the biggest selling musical artists of all time.

1. The Beatles
2. Elvis
3. Zeppelin
4. Garth Brooks
5. The Eagles

And the top selling individual albums of all time:

1. Eagle's Greatest Hits
2. Thriller
3. The Wall
4. Led Zeppelin IV
5. some Billy Joel album

Now I'm not saying, I'm just saying, but I'm pretty sure there are a bunch more music buyers around now than there were 40 years ago, yet somehow the music side of the Big List seems way more reasonable than the movie side when you try to draw parallels between The Greats and The Moneymakers. How is that possible? Lots of reasons, I'm sure, most of which have to do with the price of a giant box of junior mints.

Maybe the movie industry needs to get off their collective asses and drive some real innovation in content distribution. Maybe they shouldn't be so quick to turn their collective backs on their 80 year old catalogue. Maybe they should send me a bunch of free DVDs to evaluate.

Or maybe they could just sit back and hope for another Jar-Jar. That dude made millions!

Top Selling Albums of All Time [riaa]
All Time Movie Box Office Records - USA [imdb]
Can Money Buy the Beatles' Apple love? [usatoday]