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A Look at The Biggest Box Office Stories from 1972-present (THABOS: The History of Amazing Box Office Stories) | IT'S FINALLY COMPLETE!!!!!!!

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Once I get to the era of film where I am can use memory and recollection I will be able to include different films and not just the top 10 of each year. For now this is all research.

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Continuing with the rest of 1975, the only other two films that managed to crack the 100 million mark (which was like the 400 million mark today) was One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  Two completely different films that managed to capture the imagination of film goers.  The Rocky Horror Picture Show took in just under 113 million.  Although largely critically panned on initial release, it soon became known as a midnight movie when audiences began participating with the film at the Waverly Theater in New York City in 1976. Audience members returned to the cinemas frequently and talked back to the screen and began dressing as the characters, spawning similar performance groups across the United States. At almost the same time, fans in costume at the King's Court Theater in Pittsburgh began performing alongside the film. This "shadow cast" mimed the actions on screen above and behind them, while lip-syncing their character's lines. Still in limited release four decades after its premiere, it is the longest-running theatrical release in film history. It is often shown close to Halloween. Today, the film has a large international following. It was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress in 2005.  

 

***A lot of The Rocky Horror picture Show's gross came from many many different releases.

 

Tim Curry and Susan Surandon were the two headliners. This is the role you have never seen them in before.  If you only know Curry from IT and Surandon from films like Thelma and Louise, then you might be shocked to see the two of them in this one.  

 

This film has never actually been pulled from its original release and continues, to this day, to play at midnight screenings across the world.  

 

The other film to break 100 million in 1975 was the eventual best picture winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.  

 It's a comedy-drama directed by Miloš Forman, based on the 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey. The film stars Jack Nicholson and features a supporting cast of Louise Fletcher, William Redfield, Will Sampson, and Brad Dourif.

Considered to be one of the greatest films ever made, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is No. 33 on the American Film Institute's 100 Years... 100 Movies list. The film was the second to win all five major Academy Awards (Best Picture, Actor in Lead Role, Actress in Lead Role, Director, and Screenplay) following It Happened One Night in 1934, an accomplishment not repeated until 1991 by The Silence of the Lambs.

 

The 70's were a different time and films like this (which would never even find a distributor in today's film climate) could not only get made but thrive.  Cuckoo's Nest struck a chord with audiences all over North America.  Actor Kirk Douglas—who had originated the role of McMurphy in the 1963-64 Broadway stage version of the Ken Kesey novel—had purchased the film rights to the story and tried for a decade to bring it to the big screen, but was unable to find a studio willing to make it with him. Eventually, he gave the rights to his son Michael Douglas, who succeeded in getting the film produced–but the elder Douglas, by then nearly 60, was considered too old for the McMurphy role, which ultimately went to 38-year old Jack Nicholson.  Michael also cast his oldest friend in the business, Danny Devito.  The cast was one of the strong casts of the 70's although they were relatively unknown at the time...save for Nicholson.  This allowed the producers to pay most of the actors scale, with the exception of Nicholson.  Cuckoo's Nest won five Oscars and was nominated for 9 in total.

 

A few other films worth mentioning in 1975 are Dog Day Afternoon, which starred Al Pacino and grossed 50 million.  It's a story of a bank heist gone wrong and it also relied on new star Al Pacino to sell it to the audience.  Coming off his massive star making performances in both the Godfather films, Sidney Lumet managed to get a terrific performance from Pacino which helped it at the box office.  This was the number four film of the year.  

 

The tenth highest grossing film of the year was The Other Side of the Mountain, a film none of us have probably heard of.  It's based on a true story about a champion skiier who becomes paralyzed.  This little film, which can be compared to perhaps something like Eddie the Eagle, made 34 million in 1975, or the equivalent to about 125 million in 2017.  Interesting how times have changed and what sells now as compared to back then.

 

We'll tackle 1976 where a dog lover from Philadelphia finds his big break against someone who loves his hair.

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On 4/15/2017 at 11:27 PM, baumer said:

1973 had a few interesting stories.  The Sting was the highest grossing film of the year as it made an unheard of 156 million dollars.  The film starred two eventual legends, Paul Newman and Robert Redford. 

 

The Sting not only made a fortune, it also turned Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid into a blockbuster when it was re-released after the Sting success if I'm not mistaken. You rarely get a better proof of star powers than this, the chance to have the same movie-released before and after your cast became draw with totally different box office result.

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3 hours ago, DAR said:

So is this just focusing from the 70's onward or will there be a bit about box office in an earlier time?

 

I'm not going back before I was born.  It starts from 1972 on.  

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1976 only had one 100 million dollar film and it might have been the least likely film to get there.  Rocky is a film about a down and out Philadelphia boxer who gets his chance at the big time by sheer luck.  Sylvester Stallone wrote the script in three days and was offered $100,000 for the script.  The studio loved the script but wanted A-list movie stars in the film.  Stallone would not sell the script unless he could play the lead role.  He held on to the script and when United Artists finally agreed to let him be the lead, they cut the budget down from 6 million to 1 million.  They basically gave up on it thinking it would be a minor hit.  

 

The film, shot in 28 days, was a sleeper hit; it earned $225 million in global box office receipts, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1976, and went on to win three Oscars, including Best Picture. The film received many positive reviews and turned Stallone into a major star. In 2006, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Rocky is considered to be one of the greatest sports films ever made and was ranked as the second-best in the genre, after Raging Bull, by the American Film Institute in 2008.  

 

An interesting factoid to this is that producers Irwin Winkler and Robert Chartoff were not allowed to go one dollar over budget and when they did, they had to mortgage their houses for the extra $100,000 they went over.  When the film went on the become a box office giant, the producers made their money back and much, much more.  

 

The second highest grossing film of 1976 is a film I'd never heard of and I'm guessing most of you haven't either.

 

To Fly! was written by Jim Freeman, Greg MacGillivray, Tom McGrath, Francis Thompson, Robert M. Young and Arthur Zegart. It was directed by Freeman and MacGillivray, and edited by documentary filmmaker Alexander Hammid. In 1995, the film was deemed "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" by the United States Library of Congress and selected for preservation in the National Film Registry.

The movie was shown in 1979 at Six Flags Great America theme park's Pictorium and was the first movie shown at the new theatres.

To Fly! was the highest grossing documentary of all time before the release of Fahrenheit 9/11 in 2004. It has grossed $86.6 million domestically and $120.7 million worldwide, which it has accumulated during its decades in release. The movie is still shown daily at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C.

 

Barbara Streisand's A Star is Born came in at number three with 80 million and the Robert Redford, Dustin Hoffman political thriller All the President's Men came in at number four with 70 million.

 

All the President's Men is a political thriller film directed by Alan J. Pakula. The screenplay by William Goldman is based on the 1974 non-fiction book of the same name by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, the two journalists investigating the Watergate scandal for The Washington Post. 

All the President's Men is the third instalment of what informally came to be known as Pakula's "paranoia trilogy". The other two films in the trilogy are Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974).

In 2010, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant"

 

Coming in at number 9 was the third Dirty Harry, The Enforcer.  It made 46.2 million. 

 

Best picture winner Network, which was released one week after Rocky, took in 23 million or the equivalent of about 95 million in today's dollars.  

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3 hours ago, Tele Came Back said:

ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW needs some sort of asterisk for its gross. It didn't make very much during 1975 or even 1976.

 

Yes, you are right.  I did hit that briefly in the write up.  But I will put an asterisk beside it.

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By now, everyone knows Star Wars was released in 1977.  There's probably nothing I can write here that most don't already know, but FWIW, here's my tribute to Star Wars.

 

Perhaps no film, in the long history of Hollywood, did more to change movies than George Lucas' Star Wars did.  Lucas originally wanted to buy the rights to Flash Gordon.  Director Francis Ford Coppola, who accompanied Lucas in buying the Flash Gordon rights, recounted in 1999, "[George] was very depressed because he had just come back and they wouldn't sell him Flash Gordon. And he says, 'Well, I'll just invent my own.''  Lucas spent the next 5 years writing Star Wars.  It went through 5 drafts before finally settling on the script that we know now.  Luke Skywalker was originally called Luke Starkiller.  There were many other changes as well.  United Artists passed on it and so did Disney and Universal.  But Lucas had a friend in Alan Ladd Jr. from 20th Century Fox.  He loved Lucas' American Graffiti and although he didn't understand all of the script (in fact he flat out didn't get the lingo or the technical jargon) he believed in Lucas and eventually he helped secure a budget of 8 million.  During filming, the budget kept increasing and Lucas was inventing special effects as he was going along.  His nascent company ILM were working on special effects even in post production as they raced to get the film finished on time.  The final budget for the film ended up being just under 11 million and 20th Century Fox wanted to shut down production because they felt the film was an albatross and it was going to tank.  The only person who stood in the way of this happening was Ladd, who fought for Lucas every step of the way.

 

In February 1977, Lucas screened an early cut of the film for Fox executives, several director friends, along with Roy Thomas and Howard Chaykin of Marvel Comics who were preparing a Star Wars comic book. The cut had a different crawl from the finished version and used David Prowse's voice for Darth Vader. It also lacked most special effects; hand-drawn arrows took the place of blaster beams, and when the Millennium Falcon fought TIE fighters, the film cut to footage of World War II dogfights. The reactions of the directors present, such as Brian De Palma, John Milius, and Steven Spielberg, disappointed Lucas. Spielberg, who claimed to have been the only person in the audience to have enjoyed the film, believed that the lack of enthusiasm was due to the absence of finished special effects. Lucas later said that the group was honest and seemed bemused by the film. In contrast, Ladd and the other studio executives loved the film; Gareth Wigan told Lucas: "This is the greatest film I've ever seen" and cried during the screening. Lucas found the experience shocking and rewarding, having never gained any approval from studio executives before.

 

Here is a part of Star Wars history that @Tele Came Back taught me about.....read on for the Sorcerer debacle.  

 

Star Wars debuted on Wednesday, May 25, 1977, in 32 theatres.  Now keep in mind, there was no internet, no Mojo and no instant tracking.  George Lucas was so unsure about the success of Star Wars, that upon visiting Steven Spielberg on the set of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, he bet that Close Encounters would be a bigger hit than Star Wars.  Spielberg disagreed and they bet profit points of 2.5%.  Today, Spielberg still makes 2.5% of the profits from Star Wars.  I personally don't know how that would work now that Disney owns Star Wars but I would imagine Spielberg still gets his royalties.   Perhaps someone here can correct me if I'm wrong.  

 

Lucas decided he would be in Hawaii with his wife when Star Wars came out.  He was watching the evening news when Walter Cronkite discussed the gigantic lines for Star Wars.  This is when Lucas realized he just became a very wealthy man.  But before all of this happened, back to 20th CF.  They too were unsure of the films success.  They were promoting The Other Side of Midnight as their big summer film and they had Star Wars as their secondary film for theater owners to play.  

 

Star Wars blew up instantly and it quickly set box office records and made household names of the cast.  Harrison Ford even had his shirt ripped off when buying an album at a record store.

 

 

The film was a huge success for 20th Century Fox, and was credited for reinvigorating the company. Within three weeks of the film's release, the studio's stock price had doubled to a record high. Prior to 1977, 20th Century Fox's greatest annual profits were $37 million, while in 1977, the company broke that record by posting a profit of $79 million. Although the film's cultural neutrality helped it to gain international success, Ladd became anxious during the premiere in Japan. After the screening, the audience was silent, leading him to fear that the film would be unsuccessful. Ladd was later told by his local contacts that, in Japan, silence was the greatest honor to a film, and the subsequent strong box office returns confirmed its popularity.

 

This is for Tele.

 

After two weeks William Friedkin's Sorcerer replaced Star Wars at Mann's Chinese Theatre because of contractual obligations.  When Star Wars made an unprecedented second opening at Mann's Chinese Theatre on August 3, 1977, after Sorcerer failed, thousands of people attended a ceremony in which C-3PO, R2-D2 and Darth Vader placed their footprints in the theater's forecourt.  At that time Star Wars was playing in 1,096 theaters in the United States.  Approximately 60 theaters played the film continuously for over a year.

 

Star Wars has a legacy like no other film in the history of cinema.  It's not just the box office, it's what Star Wars represents and how studios scrambled to get their own version of Star Wars out.  It's how ILM became a big boy....it's how Lucas brokered a deal for himself and the merchandising rights.  

 

Film critic Roger Ebert wrote in his book The Great Movies, "Like The Birth of a Nation and Citizen Kane, Star Wars was a technical watershed that influenced many of the movies that came after." It began a new generation of special effects and high-energy motion pictures. The film was one of the first films to link genres together to invent a new, high-concept genre for filmmakers to build upon. Finally, along with Steven Spielberg's Jaws, it shifted the film industry's focus away from personal filmmaking of the 1970s and towards fast-paced, big-budget blockbusters for younger audiences.

 

Filmmakers who have said to have been influenced by Star Wars include James Cameron, J.J. Abrams, Damon Lindelof, Dean Devlin, Gareth Edwards, Roland Emmerich, John LasseterDavid Fincher, Peter Jackson, Joss Whedon, Christopher NolanRidley Scott, John Singleton, Michael Bay and Kevin Smith.  Scott, Cameron, and Jackson were influenced by Lucas's concept of the "used future" (where vehicles and culture are obviously dated) and extended the concept for their films, such as Scott's science fiction films Alien and Blade Runner, Cameron's acclaimed sequel Aliens and his earlier breakthrough film The Terminator. Jackson used the concept for his production of The Lord of the Rings trilogy to add a sense of realism. Christopher Nolan cited Star Wars as an influence when making the 2010 blockbuster film, Inception.

 

Star Wars was released 40 years ago next month.  It's legacy is cemented and its influence immeasurable.  Rogue One, a prequel to the original film, just made a billion dollars at the box office and now with Disney at the helm, SW seems to be in good hands with great film makers at the helm.  We are now into the 9th film about to come out and the appetite for Star Wars is just as great now as it was in 1977, 1980 and 1983.  Other films had usurped it in terms of box office and on a world wide gross, two James Cameron films are ahead of The Force Awakens, but beyond the box office Star Wars has left us something indelible, something you can't count using dollars.  It's given generation after generation something to see together, something to talk about and something to love together.  JAWS is still my favourite film of all time, but  Star Wars and all of its sequels are very close behind.  It's also a film that shows and proves that if you have an imagination, if you believe and if you never give up (like Stallone and Rocky), good things can happen.  George Lucas gave us something that will live on forever.  Star Wars is a legacy that will live on long after I'm gone from this Earth.    

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The giant success of star wars combined with an iconic failure of a giant really 70s director movie failure at the same time, make it really a 1-2 punch of a change of time to come.

 

Quote

 Today, Spielberg still makes 2.5% of the profits from Star Wars.  I personally don't know how that would work now that Disney owns Star Wars but I would imagine Spielberg still gets his royalties.

 

I'm not sure but I think Fox had home video distribution deal of star wars for eternity:

 

20th Century Fox owned full rights to the original film until they sold it to Lucas in 1998 in exchange for a lower distribution fee for the prequels and broadcast rights to Episode I.[135] In late 2012, The Walt Disney Company announced a deal to acquire Lucasfilm for $4.05 billion, with approximately half in cash and half in shares of Disney stock.[136] Although Disney gained the ownership rights to all six Star Wars films, under a previous deal with Lucasfilm, the full distribution rights to A New Hope will remain with Fox in perpetuity, while the physical distribution arrangements for the remaining films are set to expire in 2020 (Lucasfilm had retained the television and digital distribution rights to all Star Wars films produced after the original).

 

When they did the recent 2015 re-release home video on Itunes, they had to make a deal with 20th Century Fox.

 

Now I'm not sure what the difference is between owning full rights, versus just distribution rights (I imagine they cannot do any modification to the movie or use is image in anything else and stuff like that)

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