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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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.
image.png
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