Gone With the Wind (1939) Box Office:20 million Tickets Sold in the First Year.

[DeeCee]

This a thread for discussion about GWTW's box office. The discussion came up during Avatar's run and I had a thread at the old BOM forums.  This something I started back then.  I'm not sure if there's a thread elsewhere. Mods can move if they like.

 

Below is as far as I got with a formally written piece with calculations. I think I still have info on all 10 releases on paper.  The calculations below are from 2010. 

 

 

 

Edited January 4, 2016 by DeeCee

[DeeCee]

 
Gone With The Wind
 
First Release
World Premier-15/12/1939-Atlanta, Georgia, USA
New York Premier-19/12/1939 at Capital Theatre and Astor Theatre
It played for 4 weeks until the 17/1/1940 at Loew's Theatre(Matinee-75c/Evening-$1) in New York.  It had a 44 week run at Astor Theatre in New York with top ticket price of $2.20(this was probably only for a few private box seats) other tickets were the same scale as at Loew's.  On 5 OCT 1940 The New York Times reported that 2.5 million people had seen GWTW at the Astor Theatre.
Los Angeles Premier-28/12/1939
 
General Release USA-17/1/1940.  Various news articles indicated that prints travelled around the country until about October 1940.  It would generally stay in a theatre for about 1-2 weeks and then move to another theatre.  I have been unable to determine how many prints were released.  As a regional example on 29/3/1940 it was released at the Oriental Theatre Rochester(upstate NY)-morning/matinee-75c/night-$1.10. It was in the theatre for one week.  All showings in every town were promoted as special advance screenings and were priced the same everywhere.  The advertisements specifically stated that GWTW would be shown at these advanced prices until 1941 at the earliest. 
 
During this first release the box office gross was $23.5 million at advanced ticket prices with an original audience of 20 million.  Variety lists the rental returns for this release as being $14m.  The average ticket price for GWTW during its first release would have been between about 90 cents(going by the advertisements) and $1.17($23.5m/20m admissions).  This discrepancy suggests that the admissions during the first release may have been a high as 24-25million or many screenings were priced higher than the advertisements I have located.  According to BOM the average ticket price for all films in 1940 was 24 cents.
 
Adjusting by ticket price inflation using BOM's method gives an adjusted gross of $152.2m (20million*$7.61).  Using CPI inflation (http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm) $23.5m in 1940 adjusts to $363.7m in 2010. 
 
These adjustments don't fit with my previous understanding that ticket prices inflation has been faster than CPI inflation so further investigation is required.  As I have stated prevously if you really feel the need to adjust I prefer CPI inflation over ticket price inflation.
 
 
 

 

[JonathanLB]

Huh, interesting. Is it possible that ticket price inflation and normal inflation just vary depending on the time period? Like back then, movies weren't as highly valued as entertainment, so their inflation rate was lower, or their relative cost was lower, and in the past few decades, ticket price inflation has been well outpacing regular inflation. Just a theory, though.

 

Thanks for the info!

[Harpospoke]

That's a good reminder of how there were far fewer screens back then and far fewer showtimes.   GWTW had to beat incredible odds to do what it did.  (Notice how few movies from back then appear on the adjusted list)   If I had a time machine that's actually one of the time periods I would want to visit to see the cultural phenomenon in person.    The whole country was engaged in who should be cast in the movie.

[terrestrial]

Only want to add that 1939 the average ticket price got down in relation to earlier years, despite the very much over the average costs for a GWTW ticket. Means IMHO without GWTW... the average might have been even deeper (didn't calculate, might have not enough impact also)

 

I used the 'What did it cost' website, as simpler to copy out (my charts are in another computer).

 

till 1923 = 7ct

1924 till 1928 = 25ct

1929 till 1933 = 35ct

1934 = 23ct

1935 = 24ct

1936 till 1938 = 25ct

1939 = 23ct

1940 = 24ct

growing from here on on

 

Added as hint about ticket prices not going up and up... as a lot of people seem to assume, crisises for varying reasons brought them down too in times people went in really high numbers to the cinemas in comparison to today, but not only to watch a movie there. And growing numbers of cheaper cinemas and....

 

[Jessie]

GWTW's run is no way near as special as films like Titanic, Avatar or TFA

[DeeCee]

This all I could find.  I have two contradictory pages of notes.  It was sometimes hard to determine whether an article was talking about gross or rental returns.  There's also the problem of having to deal with paywalls.  

 

1st Release-December 1939:20 million admissions

Detailed in the post above.

 

2nd Release-January 1941:32 million admissions [EDIT:NYT article says 52 million total admission before the 3rd release below]

This was the first general release and ticket prices were more in line with other films.  This figure came from a contemporaneous newspaper article.

 

3rd Release-March 1942:24 million admissions

I have a figure of $7 million and calculated admissions from the average ticket price of the time.

 

4th Release-October 1947:20 million admissions

My notes on the 4th and 5th release are a bit of a mess.  Need more data.  I have a figure of $8 million.

 

5th Release-June 1954:32 million admissions

I found an article mentioning $15 million for this release.

 

6th Release-March 1961:7 million admissions

$5 million.  I wrote this "Atlanta only?"  Not sure what that means.

 

7th Release-October 1967:12.4 million admissions

$15 million.

 

8th Release-September 1974:8 million admissions

$15 million.

 

9th Release-February 1989:0.6 million admissions

$2.4 million.

 

10th Release-June 1998:1.4 million

$6.75 million.

 

Add all this up gives a total admissions of 157.4 million or a box office gross of $1,355,214 in 2016 dollars.

 

BOM has figure of $189,523,031 for all releases prior to 1989 and 1998 which they list separately.  Nobody knows where this figure comes from.

 

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?page=releases&id=gonewiththewind.htm

 

These are the dates people should search if they want to find more concrete data.  Maybe you subscribe to you local newspaper and they now have online versions of the paper from these years.

Edited January 4, 2016 by DeeCee

[Talkie]

So, does all of this boil down to GWTW's earnings and ticket figures being little more than guesswork? Does even WB know how much it really made over all of the re-releases?

 

As an aside, my mom was a kid in the late 1930s. She told me that she and her siblings would take the train to downtown Washington and pay $0.25 for tickets to matinee shows. Serials, cartoons, newsreels and short films played with every major release. Often new films would be double-featured with older ones. Kids could make a day of it and be home for supper. 

[terrestrial]

30 minutes ago, DeeCee said:

These are the dates people should search if they want to find more concrete data.  Maybe you subscribe to you local newspaper and they now have online versions of the paper from these years.

Are you aware about a lot of the BO details reporting newspapers/magazines out of that times are already in public domain? There is an organisation that scanned a lot of those (or nearly all of them? = USA) who put those on the internet.

But it's still a lot of work, as you have to read those details in all those papers and add them up yourself or have to read till you find summaries in articles out of that time.

Depending on the year, Variety has a vast archive online too, but I am not sure if that is accessable for all subscribers or ????

[DeeCee]

8 minutes ago, terrestrial said:

Are you aware about a lot of the BO details reporting newspapers/magazines out of that times are already in public domain? There is an organisation that scanned a lot of those (or nearly all of them? = USA) who put those on the internet.

But it's still a lot of work, as you have to read those details in all those papers and add them up yourself or have to read till you find summaries in articles out of that time.

Depending on the year, Variety has a vast archive online too, but I am not sure if that is accessable for all subscribers or ????

Yes.  I did a fair bit of online searching back in 2010 and linked and pasted things into the BOM thread.  

[Rthmessiah]

17 minutes ago, terrestrial said:

Are you aware about a lot of the BO details reporting newspapers/magazines out of that times are already in public domain? There is an organisation that scanned a lot of those (or nearly all of them? = USA) who put those on the internet.

But it's still a lot of work, as you have to read those details in all those papers and add them up yourself or have to read till you find summaries in articles out of that time.

Depending on the year, Variety has a vast archive online too, but I am not sure if that is accessable for all subscribers or ????

Every issue of daily/weekly Variety from 1906 is available online and searchable various ways  but it'll cost you like $600 a year or monthly $60(there's limit on article retrieval), standard Variety subscribers get limited access to archives, some libraries around the world have printed Variety with yearly indexes available

Edited January 4, 2016 by Rth

[TalismanRing]

3 hours ago, terrestrial said:

Only want to add that 1939 the average ticket price got down in relation to earlier years, despite the very much over the average costs for a GWTW ticket. Means IMHO without GWTW... the average might have been even deeper (didn't calculate, might have not enough impact also)

 

I used the 'What did it cost' website, as simpler to copy out (my charts are in another computer).

 

till 1923 = 7ct

1924 till 1928 = 25ct

1929 till 1933 = 35ct

1934 = 23ct

1935 = 24ct

1936 till 1938 = 25ct

1939 = 23ct

1940 = 24ct

growing from here on on

 

Added as hint about ticket prices not going up and up... as a lot of people seem to assume, crisises for varying reasons brought them down too in times people went in really high numbers to the cinemas in comparison to today, but not only to watch a movie there. And growing numbers of cheaper cinemas and....

 

 

 

Interesting that ticket prices shot up 30% when the great Depression hit.

 

Also, to put the 72m admissions just after the first general release (and 96m after the second) in perspective the US population was 130.9m in 1939.  (It's almost 2 1/2 times bigger now).

[terrestrial]

10 minutes ago, Talkie said:

... and pay $0.25 for tickets to matinee shows. Serials, cartoons, newsreels and short films played with every major release. Often new films would be double-featured with older ones. Kids could make a day of it and be home for supper. 

 

That is, what I try to tell people here repeatedly.

Then cinema was in no way compareable to todays cinema.

More like TV including news about important stuff and glitz, todays glitz... reports via bloggers / vip / sport event reports... websites all together, plus see serials, the normal to us everyday entertainment too.

No mobiles... people drove together,... social meeting like today via social media, discussing movies, news, glitz,...

...and to watch movies.

 

We get to see documataries in school, TV,.... about WW I, Depression, WW II,... Russian revolution, about Hollywood... old TV series similar too out of times when 'no one' even owned a TV. In 1948 it was still under 3m sold units in total, that includes the ones at that time already broken.

Ignoring experimental tries, in the US TV started at 1 July 1941.

A lot of filmed news material older than that exists... news were shown in the cinemas till years after WW II

Even in the '60 they put TV series episodes in cinemas - if colored ones, and see UNCLE, also cut a bit more adult than they could show on TV.

 

[TalismanRing]

5 hours ago, JonathanLB said:

Huh, interesting. Is it possible that ticket price inflation and normal inflation just vary depending on the time period? Like back then, movies weren't as highly valued as entertainment, so their inflation rate was lower, or their relative cost was lower, and in the past few decades, ticket price inflation has been well outpacing regular inflation. Just a theory, though.

 

Thanks for the info!

 

Far more people went to the movies then and it was also a time when movie chains owned movies studios so they were getting all the profit.  Loews owned MGM.

http://articles.latimes.com/1989-01-01/entertainment/ca-223_1_greatest-year/2

 

Quote

In 1938, Americans were buying a phenomenal 80 million movie tickets a week. The business was so prosperous that bankers backing up the studios became less concerned with cost consciousness and more concerned with increased production. The result was that producers had more freedom and were inclined to indulge their most creative directors, those they could count on to turn out responsible films.

 

 

Quote

There were 365 films released in the United States in 1939, an average of one a day and about twice the number that was released in 1988. But the most cursory scan of those films by a knowledgeable film buff will produce 50 or more recognizable titles. We've named 37 movies so far in this story, and we haven't even mentioned "Idiot's Delight" (Clark Gable dances!), "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes," and "The Hound of the Baskervilles." Or "Gulliver's Travels"!

 

[pieman]

2 hours ago, Jessie said:

GWTW's run is no way near as special as films like Titanic, Avatar or TFA

 

Totally untrue. If anything it is way more significant.

[terrestrial]

25 minutes ago, Rth said:

Every issue of daily/weekly Variety from 1906 is available online and searchable various ways  but it'll cost you like $600 a year or monthly $60(there's limit on article retrieval), standard Variety subscribers get limited access to archives, some libraries around the world have printed Variety with yearly indexes available

Thank you!

Wow, that's a bit much for to look up a few details from time to time, especially as part of that is in the PD already.

I had in the past access to that, based on a previous second job.

Me being an idiot, not taking full advantage to it then, as in I read a lot, but didn't save it. But then the data storage space on my computer was much smaller than nowadays. I started pre-HDD with the brown soft thingies btw., but that was before me accessing Variety and so on.

[IronJimbo]

34 minutes ago, pieman said:

 

Totally untrue. If anything it is way more significant.

 

10+ re-releases in a time before home cinema.

[DeeCee]

1 hour ago, Rth said:

Every issue of daily/weekly Variety from 1906 is available online and searchable various ways  but it'll cost you like $600 a year or monthly $60(there's limit on article retrieval), standard Variety subscribers get limited access to archives, some libraries around the world have printed Variety with yearly indexes available

Do you recall how BOM came up with their $189m figure for GWTW?

[terrestrial]

14 minutes ago, IronJimbo said:

10+ re-releases in a time before home cinema.

....with only a small percentage of available screens in comparison.

 

And that's only 1 out of a lot of details to take into consideration too

 

 

Edited January 4, 2016 by terrestrial

[IronJimbo]

2 minutes ago, terrestrial said:

....with only a small percentage of available screens in comparison.

 

And that's only 1 out of a lot of details to take into consideration too

 

 

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