Gross

Avengers: Endgame is now the world champion. It has made more money than any other movie ever on this planet. Galactic receipts are a little slow coming in, so it's difficult to calculate how it sits in the universal scheme of things. That film just passed up Avatar, which had previously held the distinction of being the movie with the most zeros behind it. It was a ten year hike up the hill to make a series of movies that put Marvel over the top, while James Cameron continues to threaten us with additional stories from Pandora. Just not anytime soon. Perhaps by the time they are finally released, tickets to the 4D IMaximus screenings will be selling for a million dollars apiece which should make the crowning of a new champion that much easier.

We are less than a week away from the digital release of the Avengers swan song. This ensures the machine that has been printing money for the past few months will continue to do so as the focus shifts from the big screen to the big screen TVs. Robert Downey Jr. and his progeny will be taken care of for some time to come as a result. Whew. 

But this inevitably starts a wider discussion: What about Gone With The Wind? What about Star Wars? All of these box office totals don't tend to show up with inflation and ticket price figured in. For most industry types, it's not exactly about tickets sold, it's about the bottom line. What about production costs? Advertising? Back in 1939 MGM didn't have to pay for TV ads. Or a web site. Without cable TV, there was little else to do with your entertainment dollar. A town might only have one movie theater, instead of a superfaplex of concrete bunkers in which daily showings could take place around the clock. 

Back in 1977, I spent the summer going to as many showings as I could of Episode IV: A New Hope. Because the alternative was staying at home and watching Gene Rayburn host Match Game. Sitting around on my parents' lawn with my friends: "Whaddya wanna do?" "I dunno. Whaddyou wanna do?" "I don' know. Star Wars?" "Again?" Pause. "Yeah. Okay." So I figure I contributed considerably to the bottom line on that one.

These were films that were so popular that they decided to name a video store chain for them. We now live in a world in which a film that makes a million dollars during its opening week can be considered a bomb. No one suggested that a video store chain be named after that. It was my niece who first made the observation to me that Avatar was really just a very expensive version of Ferngully. But since the story of the last rain forest only brought in one percent of the money Avatar gobbled up, it's probably not worth further discussion. I expect the reboot of Ferngully, starring a CGI Brad Pitt, will put Twenty-First Century Fox over the top.