"TITANIC: Or why Star Wars is still the most popular film of all time"

by Sean Crandall

Well it's been almost two years now since Titanic came into the Box Office and stole away the title for number one money making film of all time away from Star Wars: A New Hope. But does this really mean that more people went to the movies to go and see Titanic than Star Wars? Since Titanic is also tied with Ben Hur for the most Academy Awards won by a feature film, does that mean that Titanic is the greatest movie of all time? No, and hardly. One might say that the evidence is stacked against me, however, there are various factors that need to be considered when looking at the overall success of the movie Titanic. Once this is done, the myth of the success of the movie Titanic will be dispelled.

First we need to consider economics, since Titanic is now the highest grossing film of all time, replacing Star Wars. There's one word that comes to mind when I think of this, inflation. This ranking of the highest grossing films of all time never takes into consideration the idea of inflation. I was reading somewhere on the internet the other day of how in 1939 a movie ticket was only about $.50, in comparison to the average today, which I thought was I little low, which is around $5.00 (personally, I have to pay around $7.00 to go and see a new movie). Gone with the Wind, which was released in 1939, was ranked 25th highest grossing film the last time I had checked, and it's a very popular film to this day (although I personally don't care for it). Just in the last year I have noticed how the prices in movie tickets has gone up $.50, which doesn't sound like much at first but when you multiply that with the number of people who go to see a movie, the overall figures start to look very large. Titanic and Star Wars are separated by twenty years, and during that time our economy in this country has grown considerably, but an economy does not grow without some degree of inflation. From what I've seen, there is no realistic way to calculate the number of people who have gone to see a particular movie, since the movie industry really doesn't care how many people go to see a film, they only care about what kind of profit the get from the film. Another thing to note is the fact that Star Wars actually caused traffic problems because of its immense popularity. You never heard that about Titanic, although it did manage to get the average teenage girl to go and see the film roughly eight times in the theater, which adds up to a large chunk of change. Furthermore, Star Wars had only cost around $15 million to make, while Titanic was at a wasteful $200 million, which almost cancels out most of the money that Titanic earned in surpassing Star Wars.

As far as the Academy Awards are concerned, Star Wars faired well considering the fact that the story took place in space. The voting members of the Academy seem to have this thing against giving any substantial credit to any movie that is of the science fiction/fantasy genre. Titanic faired very well in the Academy Awards for one reason, this is a reason that I'm so very convinced of. The previous year, movies that were featured in the Academy Awards were all independent films that were far more artistic than they were popular. Most people who were watching the Award show on t.v. probably hadn't ever seen any of those movies, in fact I've only seen parts of The English Patient to this day, and nothing of the other films. Since the popular films were all but passed over, many people were turned off by the award show. In an effort to raise the show's ratings they blatantly nominated every major popular film that had come out that year, and in particular they seemed to stay with the films that were the freshest in our minds, Titanic, Good Will Hunting, and As Good as it Gets, all of which were released at the end of '97. I believe that Titanic had surpassed Star Wars in gross earnings by the time of the awards show in March, and the media as a whole praised Titanic as being the greatest of all time precisely because of it's monetary gains. In an effort to improve the image of the Academy Awards, the Academy chose to anoint Titanic, which was the apparent favorite. This is the reason for Titanic's success at the Academy Awards.

I will admit that Titanic was a decent movie, but this is mostly because of the grand setting in which everything took place. The love story itself was actually kind of weak, but because of the events surrounding the characters the whole was elevated. I also believe that if Titanic had been released in the summer of that year, or any year for that matter, it would not have done nearly as well as it did at the box office.

For all of the reasons I have given above, Titanic's financial and critical success are a myth, and Star Wars is still the most popular and in my opinion one of the greatest films of all time (the greatest film of all time as far as I'm concerned is The Empire Strikes Back, but that's another topic altogether).