Do you enjoy a good blockbuster movie?
I do. Indeed I enjoy most types of films, all the way from the blockbuster to the art house, and all genres except musicals and horror (although even there I can make exceptions).
So at the weekend, in an effort to forget about the terrible General Election result, I went to the City Lit, a further education college in central London, to attend a one-day course on blockbuster movies run by John Wisbey.
We started with a discussion of what constitutes a blockbuster. The straightforward definition is one that has taken a really large amount of money at the box office. But other factors also come into play. Blockbusters usually have big budgets as well as big box office. They are usually grand affairs in the sense of having big sets or big themes or deploying big effects or big stunts. And they tend to be event movies with lots of pre-release speculation, grand openings, and substantial media interest.
So, what have been the biggest blockbusters in cinema history? Well, there are different ways of measuring box office. One method, used by the web site Box Office Mojo, ranks films by worldwide and domestic (US theatrical releases) grosses. You can see the top 100 here.
On this measure, the top ten are in order: “Avatar” [my review here], “Titanic” [my review here], “Marvel’s The Avengers” [my review here], “Fast & Furious 7” [my review here], “Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2″, ‘Frozen” [my review here], “Iron Man 3” [my review here], “Transformers: Dark Side Of The Moon”, “The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King” [my review here], and “Skyfall” [my review here]. I have seen eight of these 10.
But, over the years, very different films have dominated the box office. In the course of the day, John Wisbey showed us clips from the following blockbusters: “Gone With The Wind”, “Ben Hur”, “The Sound Of Music”, “The Graduate”, “Love Story”, “The Godfather”, “Jaws”, “Star Wars: A New Hope”, “E.T. – The Extra-terrestrial”, “Titantic” and “Avatar”. I have seen all but one of these 11 movies, the exception being “The Sound Of Music”.