The highest selling movie prop of all time
The magic of the silver screen is that it’s an experience you can’t take home – unless you’re unfathomably wealthy and fancy buying one of your favourite movie props, that is. Collecting cinema memorabilia is a way of preserving seemingly innocuous items that have been seized upon by huge auction houses like Bonham’s and Christie’s, creating an entire sub-sector of film that has generated millions in additional revenue.
Unsurprisingly, items worn by women like Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn end up being some of the most expensive purchases. Monroe, in particular, is a victim of this; her hair, face and body becoming something of a cultural commodity even years beyond her death. Not only has her likeness been used countless times – most egregiously in the 2022 movie Blonde – but items worn on sets of her films create a frenzied rush of buyers at auction.
Her scene in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a testament to Monroe’s enduring aesthetic importance, becoming one of the most recreated dresses in pop-culture history, with everyone from Madonna to Margot Robbie imitating it. At a ‘Profiles in History’ auction held in 2010, the pink dress sold for an estimated price of $370,000, toted as “the most important film costume to ever come to auction”.
Likewise, her equally iconic white dress from The Seven Year Itch is the most expensive film costume ever sold. In a 2011 auction, the dress that billowed above a subway grate in one of cinema’s most iconic scenes was sold for an eye-watering $4.6million.
But it’s not just dresses that collectors are looking for, sometimes the buyers are after more niche props. An obvious example of this arrived when British singer Chris de Burgh decided to shell out $43,000 for the chest-burster prop from 1979’s Alien. Used in the terrifying scene when an infant alien explodes out of John Hurt’s chest covered in blood and gunk, the prop was shocking when employed on screen, and even more so in the filming process. In fact, co-star Veronica Cartwright reportedly passed out at the sight of it.
Another avid sci-fi fan purchased the Ghostbuster Proton Pack, which appeared in the 1984 film Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II five years later. It was purchased at auction, and the proton pack donned by Harold Ramis to banish ghosts sold for $160,000.
But the most expensive prop ever sold was none other than Robby the Robot, who appeared in the sci-fi films Forbidden Planet (1956) and The Invisible Boy (1957). Famous for saying: “Welcome to Altair IV, gentlemen”, in his first onscreen moment, he was snapped up by an anonymous buyer for an astonishing $5.3 million at a 2017 Bonhams auction.
Robby was created by industrial designer Robert Kinoshita. Built in 1955 by the MGM prop department, it took $125,000 just to make the robot. Standing at seven-foot-tall, the prop robot was also packaged at auction with his on-screen Jeep.
He became an icon of science fiction and subsequently got reused and recreated on shows like Columbo, The Thin Man, and The Addams Family, with fans dubbing him the “hardest working robot in Hollywood” – and as his sale price indicates, also the most expensive.
