When you’re working with Inflated Hollywood Play Money™ …
… anything can happen!
It’s as hallowed a statistic to Hollywood as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is to baseball: “Titanic’s” record box-office gross of $600.8 million. All of a sudden, that mark might be within “The Dark Knight’s” reach.
Distribution executives have started debating in earnest the potential total “Dark Knight” haul, which already has passed $300 million and is projected to eclipse the $400-million mark on Aug. 4 or 5. Although half a dozen industry insiders surveyed Monday said “Titanic’s” record appeared safe for now, the majority of distribution executives placed the film’s probable final gross just past $500 million, thanks in part to repeat business from across the audience spectrum.
That’s John Horn in the LAT, who goes on like that for another six grafs before getting around to mentioning that Titanic’s grosses were in 1998 dollars. But he’s not even sure of the implications of that:
Because “Titanic” came out when movie tickets were much cheaper (an average of $4.69 in 1998), it could still have sold more tickets than the “Dark Knight” will, even if the latter film somehow ends up grossing more. The average movie ticket will probably run about $7 this year.
What’s “could”? Ticket prices average $7.08 this year, according to Box Office Mojo. That’s 50 percent higher than 1998. (Titanic came out at the end of 1997.)
In other words, more than 125 million admissions were sold to Titanic.
The Dark Knight would need to make almost $900 million to equal that.
In other words, according to all the experts Horn spoke to, at best The Dark Knight might be slightly more than half as popular as Titanic. So, yeah, Titanic’s record does seem “safe for now.” And if Dark Knight does make $500 million, that will just put it in the company of the first Spider-man and Shrek 2, the two other recent mega-blockbusters.
But of course, a sentence like “The new Batman movie is doing pretty well at the box office. It might be about as big as Shrek 2” isn’t as much fun as playing with pretend money.
———-
Previously in Hitsville:
1 Comment so far
Leave a reply
“As hallowed a statistic to Hollywood as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak is to baseball”? I would think even the most susceptible to loose rhetoric would roll their eyes at this.
First, breaking Titanic’s record is an inevitability. It’s not that far ahead of the pack, and the contenders will keep coming closer till it’s broken. DiMaggio’s record has never been approached, and no one’s coming closer now than they ever have.
Second, DiMaggio’s record is much older. If you don’t remember Titanic, you’re a child.
Third, come on. No one — not movie executives, not movie fans, no one — is passionate about box office records. It is impossible for a box office record to be “hallowed”, even in the silly sense that a baseball record can be.
Fourth, not only have hits not been inflated like box office receipts, the opposite is true: there are fewer hits now that there were in DiMaggio’s time. If Dark Knight broke Titanic’s record, it would be front-page news in the industry trades, and for everyone else it would be… interesting. If someone this year broke DiMaggio’s record, it would be genuinely astonishing in a way that even many non-sports fans would understand.
It’s hard for me to believe that a writer could write a lede like that without understanding what cynical, horseshit hackwork it is.