How ‘Gone with the Wind’ set a benchmark the industry will never match
The unending sway Gone with the Wind holds over American cinema was perfectly illustrated by the uproar that greeted the 1939 classic being slapped with a disclaimer upon its abrupt removal from the HBO Max streaming library in June 2020.
Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave writer John Ridley was the impetus behind the decision, causing a worldwide outpouring of praise and criticism. This continued long after it was re-added to the streaming service with the addition of the disclaimer explaining it contains incidents and themes that “were wrong then and are wrong today”.
A movie that was over 80 years old by that point generating such intense debate for something as outwardly simple as the fact it hasn’t aged all that well underlines just how toweringly Victor Fleming’s literary adaptation looms over the whole of the medium. Reappraising it through a modern lens has led to significant reassessment, then. Still, it remains inarguable that Gone with the Wind is, without a doubt, the single most successful motion picture the United States has ever – and will ever – produce.
It’s well-known that when adjusting ticket prices for inflation, the epic love story is the highest-grossing release in history, with its box office earnings equivalent to almost $3.5billion in today’s money. There’s no other film that even comes close, but that’s just one of the reasons why Gone with the Wind will never be bettered in terms of its sheer multi-generational, industry-defying earning power.
It’s the only title to have ever sold more than 200million tickets in the United States, numbers that even today’s biggest releases couldn’t possibly dream of. For comparison’s sake, the movies that have posted the highest grosses Stateside are Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. Only one of those three shifted even half as many stubs as Gone with the Wind, which was estimated to have been seen during its first theatrical run by roughly half of the country’s entire population.
It was one of the top-earning films of the 1960s, too, with its reissue generating an additional $68million in revenue. The biggest hit of 1939, which became so immensely popular 28 years after its original run, is something that’s never going to be replicated, either, simply because it’s impossible to imagine the same thing happening again.
The highest-grossing movie of 1996 was Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, and it would be fair to say the chances of the sci-fi spectacular re-releasing at any point this year and making a killing at the box office isn’t going to happen. Admittedly, James Cameron’s 1997 work, Titanic, would do a turn were it to hit cinemas again next year. However, he’s already remastered and post-converted the disaster drama for its multiple reruns on the big screen, whereas Gone with the Wind was simply sent back out there without any notable updates, upgrades, or alterations.
Titanic is also the only one of the ten biggest ticket-shifters Stateside cinema has ever seen that released after 1982, to offer further indications of just how far ahead of the pack Gone with the Wind really is. There’s never been anything like it before or since, and the chances of such a phenomenon coming along ever again are so slim as to be non-existent. It may have first landed in 1939, but even with the eight decades of big screen greatness and constantly rising prices to follow in its wake, it’s remarkable that not a single feature has come within touching distance of matching its drawing power.
