What was the best-selling movie of the 1960s?
These days, every high-profile movie has multiple revenue streams. Beyond box office dollars, there’s television syndication, streaming rights, home video sales, merchandise, brands paying big money to have their products featured onscreen, and even things like tie-in video games and theme park attractions.
Of course, studios weren’t overflowing with options back in the 1960s. Before Steven Spielberg’s Jaws came along, reinvented the wheel, shifted the paradigm, and ushered in the blockbuster era, a lengthy run in cinemas over an extended period of time, often years, was the only way a picture could maximise profits.
In the modern age, audiences have grown accustomed to a film playing exclusively in cinemas for a matter of weeks before it arrives on digital or on-demand. That’s one of the major reasons why the box office has struggled to reach its pre-pandemic levels, because very few motion pictures are genuine must-sees.
To put things into perspective, only nine movies in the last 25 years have sold over 200 million tickets: Avatar, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Avengers: Infinity War, Avengers: Endgame, the live-action remake of The Lion King, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Avatar: The Way of Water, and the Chinese animated juggernaut Ne Zha 2, and all but one of them are sequels or franchise films.
For comparison, and remembering there were thousands, if not tens of thousands, fewer screens, six movies from the 1970s alone shifted more than 200 million stubs, including Star Wars and Jaws. Admittedly, there were only two in the previous decade, but one of them played in cinemas for almost four and a half years.
Calling Robert Wise’s The Sound of Music a phenomenon would be an understatement: the musical became the highest-grossing release in 29 countries worldwide, became the top-earning movie in cinema history, and won five Academy Awards, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’. By the time the dust settled, it was the best-selling release of the ’60s, having sold 283.3 million tickets.
It didn’t even open at number one, though, taking four weeks to reach the summit. Once it got there, The Sound of Music remained in pole position for 30 of the next 46. The song-and-dance spectacular premiered on March 29th, 1965, and it would remain a staple of multiplexes in the United States until November 23rd, 1969.
In fact, it was the best-selling movie of all time for the next 12 years until Star Wars came along, and it’s still one of the ten highest-grossing releases ever when adjusted for inflation.
What was its closest competition?
Apart from Titanic, it’s hard to think of any other time in modern cinema that a drama exploded to such an extent among the cinemagoing public that it handily beat the blockbusters, action flicks, and high-concept studio tentpoles at their own game, but it goes without saying that things weren’t quite the same in the ’60s.
The only other film to sell over 200 million tickets during the decade was David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago, which wasn’t all that far behind The Sound of Music with a 248.2 million tally. Imagining a quarter of a billion people turning up for a period-set costume piece is borderline unthinkable in today’s filmic landscape, but it just goes to show how much the times have changed.
