After 43 years, we have a new #1 movie (by attendance)

[Mike Blakesley]

Since buying my theater in 1979, I've kept a spreadsheet of all the movies, their attendance, and the grosses. Every year I add the current year's movies to the list, and then re-sort the list in various ways -- alphabetical, by gross, and most importantly, by attendance.

Ever since 1982, our most attended movie has been E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. We played it 119 days after the break, but it still did amazing business. We only ran it for two weeks, surprisingly. A few films have been pretty close to toppling its record -- recently, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Incredibles 2 and Spider-Man: No Way Home have come the closest, but I figured in this post-Covid, short window, streaming-is-king era, there was no way E.T. would ever be beaten.

Until Tom Cruise came along this year with Top Gun: Maverick and showed everybody how it's done. Top Gun managed to sell 316 more tickets for us over four weeks. (The four weeks weren't all consecutive; other schedule commitments meant that TG had to step out for other films. We've never brought a movie back for extra runs like that before, so I decided to combine all of the sales into one statistic, considering the movie was still in first-run release the whole time.)

For anyone who's interested, here's our Top Ten before Maverick knocked Dead Man's Chest out of the winner's circle. I've often wondered how much better E.T. and Titanic might have done if we'd played them on the break (Titanic played 84 days after release), but movies weren't "instant hits" back then the way they are now, I guess.

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[Frank Cox]

My theatre has only existed for 28 years so I missed out on ET.

Titanic is the biggest movie I've ever played here and I'm sure it will never be overtaken. I played it for two weeks about three months after its original release and then for one more week another month or so after that in 1998, and then I played the 3d version for one week in 2012. It's the only movie that's ever played here for four weeks. (And that ship sank every time!)

For every single one of those shows, I have never played Titanic for less than 100 people at a time.

One of my regular customers still likes to remind me that I let him and his wife come in the back door to get their ticket for Titanic because the line-up at the front was so long.

[Mike Blakesley]

I sure wish I had the stats from before 1979.... the theater opened in 1930 and I've always wondered about the numbers they got for some of the blockbusters over the years.

[James Wyrembelski]

I'd love to be able to see our theatre's entire records as well. Ours was opened in 1940. Would be really cool to see what the number one film of all time here was.

A couple years back I was cleaning the attic in the building next to the theatre, we also own that. The man that owned our theater in the 1990's had also owned the building next door and ran a couple different businesses out of it as well. I happened to come across a few boxes of old accounting forms from the theatre. So, I did get to see what attendance was like during that time. Was pretty neat to see how things were operated under his tenure and I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it was still doing.

You could see how the age of the internet has had an effect. During the 90's our theatre was a second run location and attendance was equal to or greater than it is now, although some blockbusters of today easily stomped some of the old attendance numbers. I was also surprised to see that they pretty much ran three shows a day, seven days a week.

Wouldn't it be nice to have that window of exclusivity back in some fashion??

Anyways, since we've owned the theater, 2018's The Grinch still reigns supreme followed closely by Frozen 2. I think The Grinch had close to about 2,500 patrons over 3 weeks. I only attribute that to the fact that we had only been open roughly a month and everyone was coming in droves to see the theater's first major remodel since it was constructed. But Frozen was, well, Frozen. Not really a surprise there.

I'll have to check again but Top Gun is for sure in our top 5.

[Mike Blakesley]

I've always been curious as to how long some popular movie like Gone With The Wind might have run back then. (My theatre also had 500 seats in its original format... even if they had a completely full house of adults, they would have only grossed $250 at 50¢ a seat!)

When I first started to work here in 1975, it was anywhere from 6 to 12 months after the break before a big movie would get to us -- our big worry was that it'd show up on network TV. We played two changes a week for many years, then not long after I started, the biggest movie of the year might take up a whole week. We'd start movie Film-Tech Forums on Wednesday for 3 days, then change on Saturday for 3 days, and be closed Tuesday. The idea of a holdover wasn't even considered. Right after I took over in 1979, we had Clint Eastwood's "Every Which Way But Loose" which was a huge hit, so we held it into the second week and played it a total 10 days.

We went to one change a week in early 1983. We'd play only occasional two-week runs of big hits. Titanic was our first movie that played 3 weeks, and was still doing well enough that we considered holding it over again, even though we played it about 3 months after the break. The two-week run got much more common when we started playing movies on the break, in 1999. Nowadays, thanks to our "friends" at Disney, the three-week run is pretty common but even some of those do pretty well in the 3rd week. I think this is because we put the starting and ending dates on the marquee, so people can plan ahead.

[Frank Cox]

When I opened my theatre I almost always played two movies every week: a 7pm show for kids and a 9pm show for adults. Plus an occasional midnight chop-em-up horror movie on Friday and Saturday night. Most nights I would have two shows, the kids show at 7 and the blast-em at 9, but on some weekends I'd be playing four shows: a matinee, a 7pm show, a 9pm show and a midnight show. And with a whole new set of movies every Friday I was hauling a lot of film cans around sometimes.

Some of the midnight shows were duds but others were just insane; the best one I ever did was The Craft where there wasn't a single seat left either of the two nights that I played it. I think the second best one was The Island of Doctor Moreau, which also really packed 'em in.

I only close two days each year so I play movies every night otherwise. (I close on Christmas eve and Christmas day so I can paint the auditorium floor after the show on December 23 and the paint has time to dry and the smell can go away.)

But now I just play one show per night for seven days and Saturday and Sunday matinees when I have a kids show. It's pretty rare that I play a movie for two weeks; maybe once or twice a year at the most.

[Eric Thuemmel]

Star Wars: The Force Awakens is our highest grosser (only going back 10 years). We were sold out (on both of our 2 screens!) multiple times during its run.

As far as current releases go - yesterday we just had our best day on Avatar 2 - on day 14 of its release. Our first 2 weekends have been ho-hum but this week it's really picking up.

[Bobby Henderson]

I don't have access to any records for our old (and now closed) Carmike 8 theater in Lawton. The theater was open from December of 1994 to March of 2018. Titanic was, without a doubt, that theater's biggest hit. It occupied both of the theater's two THX screens from its December 1997 opening until early April of 1998. The movie was still playing on one THX screen until early May.

Independence Day had the second longest run on both THX houses at our theater, but its time on those screens was measured in a few weeks, not months. The original Avatar movie had a similar run on those THX houses. The Lord of the Rings movies and Star Wars prequels also did very well.

It's certainly possible for newer movies to have "legs" at the cinema. But that's only if the distributors give a movie a chance to grow those legs. These ridiculously short theatrical release windows do a lot to kill business. There are signs the bean counters are finally starting to realize they're leaving a shit load of money on the table by putting to much focus on streaming. I can't speak for everyone, but I'm not at all interested in adding more subscriptions. If anything I'm looking to cancel services. There's more to life than wasting too many hours watching TV shows. I'm hesitant to get roped into watching some new TV series due to the time commitment involved. It easier to deal with a self-contained 2 hour movie. It's not as much "work."