Which movie spent the most weeks in the box office top 10?
In a world where the cultural conversation seems to move from one topic to another quicker than ever before, even blockbusters are losing their staying power. Despite the monumental buzz around the box office battle between Christopher Nolan’s historical biopic Oppenheimer and Greta Gerwig’s pink, plastic Barbie, the discourse has mainly been focused on release weekend performance.
Modern blockbusters are spending less and less time in the box office top ten, and recently Marvel’s Tom Holland-fronted sequel Spider-Man: Homecoming spent just eight weeks in the top ten, while Disney’s sequel to Frozen in 2019 lasted nine weeks. With the rise of streaming, the box office longevity of early blockbusters is long gone.
In the 1980s, huge films like Back to the Future and Titanic spent 24 and 26 weeks in the top ten, respectively. But one movie outdid them all – Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1982 sci-fi E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial spent an unrivalled 44 weeks in the box office top ten.
The story of Elliott Taylor and his alien friend E.T. endeared itself to audiences everywhere and found immediate commercial success, overtaking Star Wars as the highest-grossing film of all time and retaining this title for 11 years. Alongside eventual box office takings of almost $800million, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial garnered huge critical acclaim, including nine Academy Award nominations.
The longevity of the film’s cultural impact has long outlasted its 44 weeks in the top ten – it remains one of the most celebrated and referenced movies of all time. Between anniversary re-releases in 2002 and 2022, the character’s inclusion in George Lucas’ Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace, and the endless quotability of the film’s most iconic line, “E.T. phone home”, the blockbuster has maintained a firm grip on film and pop culture over 40 years on from its release.
The family feature has been referenced in everything from Men in Black to The Simpsons and had a huge influence on the 1980s nostalgia-infused Netflix drama Stranger Things. Eleven, played by Millie Bobby Brown, takes on an E.T.-like role in the lives of the Hawkins teens. One Stranger Things scene even directly mirrors the bicycle scene from Spielberg’s effort.
Spielberg once spoke about the success of the film in an interview with Universal Pictures as a bonus feature. He stated: “You’re not supposed to fall in love with your own movie, but I fell in love with E.T. I fell in love with that picture.” Despite this, he stated that he couldn’t have imagined the overwhelmingly positive response to the film.
He explained, “I couldn’t imagine that anybody would be interested in seeing this picture except the Disney kids. And in those days, Disney films had lost their audience, were not as popular as they once had been. Disney was a stigma in the early 80s. But I still felt that I had made a Disney film and I was also pretty convinced that the box office fate of E.T. would be the same as the box office fate of many Disney films that had come out in the ’70s and the early ’80s.”
Spielberg concluded: “I wasn’t really encouraged that I had made a commercial film, but I knew I had made a film that I would be able to live with comfortably for the rest of my life.”
Despite Spielberg’s initial concerns, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial still holds a reputation as one of the biggest blockbusters of all time and retains the title for the movie with the most weeks in the box office top ten.
