GROSS/28 1938 preview - Errol or Jimmy?
What shall I watch next?
GROSS is every year’s top-grossing movie, since 1913, reviewed.
So far I’ve been relying on two lists of top-grossing movies for this project. To be honest they’re both pretty shonky and sometimes they disagree about the year’s biggest movie. I don’t really understand how these historic numbers are arrived at - they’re all over the place - and I have to say I’m not really bothered. Provided I’ve got an interesting or beautiful film to watch for each year I’m happy.
We’ve got to 1938 and there are two candidate films. One list gives me blockbuster swashbuckler The Adventures of Robin Hood and the other screwball hit You Can’t Take it With You. I’m tempted to go for Jimmy Stewart and Jean Arthur because, well, we’ve already had one Robin Hood, but maybe I should go with Errol Flynn and Olivia de Havilland on this occasion because it was an enormous film and has slipped into the culture in a way that You Can’t Take it With You obviously hasn’t (and I should say that I have, on one occasion, for 1918, gone for a double-bill, which turned out to be an absolute combinatorial joy). Anyway, advise me using the handy Substack poll.
Here's a list of all the top-grossing films since 1913 and here's my Letterboxd list and another top-grossing list.
We talk about top-grossing because that’s the number that’s historically been calculated in the Hollywood economy, starting in 1913. Studios add up rentals paid by cinema owners. Easy. It’s not called ‘top-netting’ because it doesn’t take into account the costs of making and distributing a film - it’s just the raw, unadjusted income. There are plenty of examples of movies with really healthy gross earnings that still made a loss. 2017’s Transformers: The Last Knight is said to have grossed over $600M worldwide but still lost millions.
To make things substantially more complicated, of course, gross income now has to include all the other means of distributing a film, including the most awkward of all - streaming revenue. Useful info about calculating ‘box office’ and ‘gross earnings’ on Wikipedia.
And the lists you can find online are almost all American so we’re really talking about earnings in the 50 states. The absolute dominance of the Hollywood movie economy over the decades makes these lists a pretty good proxy for the global numbers, though. Google the annual earnings for releases in other countries, for instance, even ones with really healthy film industries, like France or South Korea and they’ll look distressingly similar to the US numbers, with varying numbers of locally-produced films usually providing a minority of the top properties.