Shattering box office benchmarks: What was the first-ever $100m movie?
Thanks to constantly rising ticket prices, movies these days don’t have to sell anywhere near as many tickets to make serious bank at the box office, but there still has to be a film that becomes the first to shatter every major record.
James Cameron’s Avatar has reigned as the highest-grossing release in cinema history for going on a decade and a half, though, even if Avengers: Endgame did briefly topple it from the summit. It could be a while before another blockbuster comes along with that kind of earning power, with the most memorable mainstream genre flicks in history having a funny way of changing the industry forever.
For Avatar, it was the influx in 3D surcharges and shoddy post-conversions, which was hardly game-changing. More than 40 years previously, Steven Spielberg single-handedly altered the trajectory of Hollywood when Jaws exploded out of the blocks to completely decimate a monumental amount of pre-existing records.
Foregoing the standard slow method of rolling out features across the country, the shark attack thriller came backed by the weight of a mass-marketing onslaught before debuting on hundreds of screens nationwide simultaneously, becoming the progenitor for the blockbuster formula that endures to this day along the way.
Jaws emerges from the deep to become a cinematic giant
Jaws scored the highest-grossing opening weekend ever in the United States and took 59 days to usurp Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather as the country’s top-earning title ever. Whereas the seminal gangster saga had topped out with $86million, Spielberg’s own classic became the first to cross the nine-figure barrier on its way to spending 14 weeks as the number-one film in America before departing with $123m in the coffers.
On a global scale, Jaws wound up as the most lucrative hit the moving image had ever experienced after clearing $450m, but it wasn’t an accolade it would hold onto for too long. As tended to be the case whenever the bearded brethren engaged in some friendly competition, George Lucas’ Star Wars dethroned Jaws as the highest-grossing movie of all time in 1977.
Spielberg would go on to reclaim the throne when E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial toppled the spacefaring epic several years later before he’d knock himself off his own perch when Jurassic Park arrived in 1993 to make him the only director to have ever helmed cinema’s top-earning title three times over.
In the modern landscape, any studio-backed blockbuster that fails to clear $100m domestically is largely viewed as a disappointment, and it speaks volumes about just how popular Jaws was during its initial run that Spielberg’s watery masterclass in ratcheting tension did it with the greatest of ease despite blazing an entirely new trail by doing so.
To put things into perspective and illuminate its success even further, Jaws sold over 243 million tickets worldwide, which is comfortably more than $2billion hit Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
