Hollywood box office records were broken this weekend with the massive success of Marvel Studios’ Avengers: Endgame. Despite its length, the film broke nearly every box office record. While some of this success has to do with simple inflation, much of it can be traced back to other changes that we will examine this week.
Adjusted for inflation, the biggest Hollywood hit is 1939’s Gone With The Wind. The film’s record haul was once considered to be insurmountable. It seemed as though everyone in the United States who could afford a ticket and lived near a theater showing the film saw the picture.
While motion pictures had very little competition at the time, there was still a very real limitation that even the biggest films from the largest studios would bump up against. Movies needed to be reproduced on film and distributed to theaters in heavy film canisters. Even a huge movie like Gone With The Wind, released by the largest movie studio at the time could not be widely distributed. Movie studios would produce as many copies of the film as they could afford and begin exhibiting them in the bigger cities. If the picture was big, it would remain in the larger markets, with some copies filtering out to lesser cities. People who lived in small towns far away from big cities would have to wait weeks, months and even years to see the biggest hits.
This limitation lasted for decades. While the studios would increase the amount of copies they’d produce for each release, they were still unable to fully produce as many copies as they might have liked for some of the more popular pictures.
Today, however, films such as Avengers: Endgame are distributed digitally. If a film did much better than expected in the past, it was virtually impossible for a studio to increase the number of screens on opening weekend. In a digital world, adding additional screens can be as easy as a flip of a switch. It is this new ability to quickly react to a film’s popularity that makes it possible for movies to make ever larger amounts of money.
