Box Office Draws -- why do they matter?

sadly this pleasure has latterly been somewhat undermined by the video and DVD industry (how the hell is waterworld better on tv than widescreen?)

wait, you saying ticket prices vary accroding to the film? I've never noticed this! Mebbe it's more common for this to be the case in the US than the UK.

...and Ptee to thread, obv.

Assuming you aren't being sarcastic...

It's just that ticket prices are under an insane rate of inflation that boggles my mind. And yes, the prices do vary, but not so much film to film as theater to theater. Usually arthouses can't get away with selling their tickets for as much as multiplexes, and of course the second-run theaters are very cheap.

I don't see this as *that* much diff't from people's interest in the lottery, Microsoft, and such--it's interesting, not to say titillating, to see what happens with all that money. I don't know that anyone confuses it with a judge of quality. If anything even mainstream media outlets play the Box Office against other institutional values like prestige, etc. "It may not have been a blockbuster, but...." One of the bad side-effects of this Box Office Mania is that otherwise sharp critics contort themselves into some kind of oppositional stance where box office becomes the enemy of art.

We get local box office reports here all the time, and lots of stories about how Quebec movies beat Hollywood ones at the home box office.

(when that happens, of course)

I was looking up something yesterday, and came across Wikipedia's week-by-week lists of films that topped box-office returns around the world. The American lists start in 1960 and carry through to the present. The figures are based on weekend returns only; I assume there's a reasonably solid correlation between what a film makes on the weekend and what it makes overall.

Normally this stuff doesn't interest me, but going through the '70s lists, I was amazed by how many critically well-regarded and/or artistically ambitious films made it to #1--much more than just The Godfather, The Exorcist, and Jaws. I'm biased--I'm always advocating for the '70s as far and away my favorite decade for English-language films--but I think the following list of #1s makes a good case for the idea that never were art and commerce so intertwined. (Not saying that all of these films succeeded at what they set out to do, but even the least successful set out to do a lot.)

1970: They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, MASH, Joe, Diary of a Mad Housewife, Five Easy Pieces
1971: Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, Klute, The French Connection
1972: Cabaret, The Godfather, Fat City, Deliverance
1973: Last Tango in Paris, Save the Tiger, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, American Graffiti, Mean Streets (one week at #1--amazing), Serpico
1974: The Exorcist, The Sugarland Express, The Conversation, Chinatown, The Godfather Part II
1975: Shampoo, The Day of the Locust, Nashville (#1 for a week, giving way to...), Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1976: Taxi Driver, All the President's Men, Carrie
1977: Annie Hall, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
1978: Coming Home, Straight Time (two weeks--again, amazing to me, always thought it was a small film nobody saw)
1979: The Deer Hunter, Manhattan, Apocalypse Now

The ones I've listed reflect my own biases, and things start slowing down the latter half of the decade. Also, I realize there are numerous factors besides artistic merit as to why a certain film might have reached #1, starting with the fact there were fewer films released then. But still, I'd put that list up against lists drawn from any other decade.