Miguel_Zorro said:
donathos said:
Miguel_Zorro said:
The inflation argument is valid, but only to a point. The argument that people have far more "other options" today is also very valid. |
Again, if you'd like to know which is "more valid" check out the OP's list. It's dominated by movies from the last 10-12 years. The reason? Because the "inflation argument" has a far, far greater impact than the "other options" argument, or any other argument.
| When Gone With the Wind came out? You had to go to the movie theatre if you wanted to see it *at all*. It also came out during World War 2, when there really wasn't much else to do for fun. For the 2+ years that it was in the theatres, the only competition that it had was a bunch of movies that I doubt many people have ever heard of. |
That said, movies have always had to compete with other forms of entertainment. The people of 1939 didn't just lie in bed staring at their ceilings. Sure, they didn't have many of the forms of entertainment that *we* enjoy today, but they didn't know that they were missing anything; they had full lives anyways.
That's why the top grossers list *doesn't* have a bunch of movies from the 20s, 30s, 40s, etc., when people supposedly had nothing better to do. Gone With the Wind is the *only* film from that era on the list, right? The only one even close. It sticks out for a reason--because it sold a ton of tickets.
Finally, as for its competition... this is what Wikipedia has to say about the movies in 1939:
Movie historians and film buffs often look back on 1939 as "the greatest year in film history". Hollywood was at the height of its Golden Age, and this particular year saw the release of an unusually large number of exceptional movies, many of which have been honored as all-time classics, when multitudes of other films of the era have been largely forgotten.
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I read that on Wikipedia already, and looked at the actually movies that came out in 1939. Which movies from 1939 do you consider exceptional and big box office draws?. More importantly, Gone With the Wind did most of its box office in 1940 and 1941. What was so big other than Gone With the Wind over the course of those 2 years?
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You're missing the point.
What Gone With the Wind did was exceptional, even for its own time. Saying that its success is accountable to its era overlooks the fact that no other movie from its era did the same thing. Saying that people at that time had no other entertainment available is false, as is saying that Gone With the Wind had no competition.
Like I/Wikipedia said, 1939 was actually a pretty big year for movies. If your point is that, well, 70+ years later not too many of those films are still all that popular, I'll grant that--it's hard for me to argue about the popularity of various movies in the 1930s, because I'm guessing that neither you nor I were alive at the time.
But look, you didn't address it in your first reply, so here's another chance: if 1930s/40s movies had some sort of advantage (people had nothing better to do) that balances out inflation--they're both "very valid" arguments--then why is the top grossing list covered in movies from the mid-to-late 90s and the 2000s? Shouldn't it be covered in those early era films?
