PT why couldnt TPM challenge Titanic at the box office ?

@Organafan Titanic received just as much derision from us hip guys as TPM did. And I think you mean the Armageddon song. (Con Air is miles better than Armageddon in my opinion)

 

Well, without 3D and IMAX, with inflation it would have made $781 million. Add in 3D, and well...it does even better.

 

I still have never seen Titanic (seen bits and pieces of it).

 

The 3D conversion for Titanic looked pretty impressive.

 

Titanic's a pretty good flick. A little hammy in the romance department, and Billy Zane's character is (enjoyably) two dimensional, but Cameron makes it all work.

 

I didn't say "Titanic" wasn't derided. I also didn't mean the song from "Armageddon" when referring to the one from "Con Air." Both were hit songs and my point was that movies still had hit songs that could help the publicity of a movie.

 

It would top Avatar, but it would likely just barely fall short of TFA. I'm talking about United States box office, just so we're clear. It's usually assumed when discussing box office we mean domestic, unless otherwise stated, but I know that's not always clear so it's better to just mention it.

The first film in each Star Wars trilogy, unbelievably, has performed fairly similarly. I know that because ANH was such a mythical film, and it started it all, that there's this idea that ANH must have sold twice as many tickets as TPM or TFA or any other movie, but that's not actually true on first release. ANH came out again in 1978, 1979, 1981, and 1982, besides the SE release in 1997. It has enjoyed many, many releases, which is why its total ticket sales count I believe (old memory here) is somewhere around 160 million or something. But on first release it was in the upper 90s, perhaps 100 million tickets sold. Both TPM and TFA were about 90 million, though I'd accept arguments for as high as 95 for each of them. All in all, not dissimilar, maybe a 10% difference.

 

i didn't say that you said that. I said that I recall just as much derision in relation to each film. The crucial difference is that Titanic was a new film and the satire surrounding it was not filtered through twenty odd years of existing popular culture references surrounding Titanic films. So it had the effect of somewhat raising the profile of a new film in a way that it might not otherwise.

Con Air's connection with How Do I Live is complicated and nowhere near as significant as the Aerosmith song was to Armageddon's success.

 

hmm

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm?adjust_yr=1

 

The number of domestic tickets needs to be measured against the size of the population. The US population has increased significantly since 1977. In 1977 it was around 220 million vs 320 million today. 1999 was about 280 million.

It's also worth noting that inflation was very high in the late 70s, early 80s.... i now boxofficemojo adjusts for inflation (although I have no idea how accurate their adjustment is)

 

Same reason nothing but Avatar could challenge Titanic. Cameron is just too good when it comes to crowd-pleasing blockbusters.

 

.oops

 

Still not sure what you're looking for in an answer to your question? And now AOTC is brought up? Seems you already have an answer in mind, just looking for someone to come along and validate it?

Anyway... Star Wars, in 1999, did not have the across the board appeal like Dinosaurs did or Romances set against the backdrop of a well known disaster.

What drove all that anticipation, all that hype, for TPM was media and fans that grew up with Star Wars and were now adults with disposable incomes. Kids weren't standing in line (at least in no significant numbers) or doing news reports. General audience goers weren't hyping the movie or waiting in line. Go through the pics that are online... There are hundreds, thousands of pics of the lines. The vast majority that were waiting were men, adult men...some women, some kids, mostly, overwhelmingly adult men...






The idea of seeing, for the first time, realistic Dinosaurs, the spectacle again had broad appeal across more Demographics than TPM did. TPM was a resurrection of an almost 20 year old movie series, that while certainly did pick up more fans over the years, had lost it's overall luster as a cultural phenomenon. It still had a presence, but, it wasn't the same as it was in the early 80's.

Now, if Lucas was worried about beating Titanic, he could have. He could have made a movie that he knew would just draw them into the theaters. Lucas is not a stupid man. He could have easily drawn in hundreds of millions of dollars more, at least domestically if he had started TPM with a scroll stating that the Clone Wars were underway. The opening scene of a huge wedge shaped spaceship chasing a smaller Jedi Cruiser. Many Jedi inside the the Jedi cruiser preparing as hundreds of stormtroopers burst into it being led by Darth Sidious slaughtering Jedi. Meanwhile somewhere on the cruiser, a young Jedi named Anakin Skywalker is tasked with protecting a droid that has some secret hidden on it as he is abandoned on some desert planet named Fantooine... see where I am going with this? Basically he didn't do what Disney did and is doing with the franchise...

Lucas told the story he wanted to tell, he didn't tell the story so as to make it so he could rake in every single penny he could by being nostalgia heavy and worrying about what "fans" would want.

 

For those of us that are old enough to remember, that TPM was a 35mm feature, here's a frame of TPM 1999 style: