Hey Jonathan, I found the post in which you said...

[Dutchy]

...that TPM would make a billion dollars.

Remember we talked about this some weeks or months ago? Well, if was doing some cleaning up and came across a print out of a discussion on the Countdown to Star Wars forum, way back in March 1999.

Here it is:

[JMK]

:lol
Sounded like me when I said AotC was going to smoke Spider-Man!

Looks like he was way off there as I was!

[Darth23]

Well I STILL think AOTC will make $477 million in the US.

Just watch those IMAX numbers.


:D ;) :D

[Jedi Master Carr]

Well TPM, did make about 1 billion WW, but I know it didn't say that. TPM probably made about 2 billion once you count merchandizing, DVD, and VHS sales, it could be the most money ever counting those things. Still, Titantic did beat it at the box office and that is what is going to be remembered.

[BUFFJEDI]

I can't believe Dutchy and you guy's are picking on sweet, little , innocent Jon :(





:lol :lol

[JediBoricua]

If we imagine that the Prequels and the OT are a huge continous 12 hour movie, we could say TPM made a billion!!!! It is the first one...

:lol

[JonathanLB]

Whatever. I hope that makes your day or something ;) You are weird.

TPM made far more than Titanic, trust me, there is absolutely no comparison. It would have been in poor taste to make toys for Titanic. Very little merchandise was actually produced, but the soundtrack sold well. DVD, however, did not. TPM beat Titanic on DVD just about 5 to 1 and it's still selling in the top 50 or so I think. Titanic didn't fare so well on DVD. On VHS, Titanic beat TPM, but not by all that much.

Merchandise sales, according to the numbers I heard, were $2 billion for TPM. The box office was about $900 million short of Titanic, so even with that, TPM still beats Titanic pretty easily as far as overall revenue goes. Interesting to note, because it does most matter what a movie makes in every field. After all, that's what the studio cares about, and none of us should care about any of it since we don't see a dime of it anyway. We just care for the fun of it, so I see no problem saying that TPM was the most successful film ever made financially. I think that would be a fair statement if you're talking about raw gross and not percentage or ratio. Anyway who cares about ratio? If you use ratios, I make more than Yahoo! and that just is stupid. I spent like $250 on Vin Diesel World and have made 10 times that much in a year, something major companies really would have difficulty duplicating. It's only achievable on a small scale, much like a movie that opens with $1 million and makes $10 million the next weekend. A film that opened with $50 million couldn't make $500 million the next weekend... hehe.

[JMK]

Come on man, you can't count TPM's merchandise in the tally vs. Titanic. It's grasping at straws.
We always refer to only a movie's box office total here when discussing this type of thing. When was the last time we added Jurassic Park's merchadising totals to its movies? I thought so. Why? Because it would make the JP franchise much more "successful" than if we just talked about its gross. It's not fair to include a movie's merchandising money in its box office success, especially when compared to a movie that has almost no merchandise to speak of. Titanic laid a massive whupping on every movie in history, and nothing has come close to achieving its level of success at the Box Office.

Toys are not movies!!!:p

[CMJ]

I remember the summer of '93 really well..."Jurassic Park" sold a HELL of alot of merchandise! I contributed a fair portion too. ;)

[JMK]

Well that's what I mean. Why don't we include Jurassic Park's merchadise sales figures with the box office total? It would probably be alot higher than it is right now. But we don't do that because (especially here at a SW forum) it narrows the gap between SW and JP. Merchandise sales are nul and void if you're talking box office success, which we are; NOT overall success which another discussion altogether. Box office champ by far = Titanic.

[Dutchy]

Originally posted by JonathanLB
You are weird.

Says someone who thought TPM would make $1 billion in the USA alone. :p

[foxdvd]

It would have been in poor taste to make toys for Titanic.


For some reason I laughed really hard at that....and if they did make Titanic toys, I would have bought them.. :)

[Jedi Master Carr]

I think TPM is probably the #1 merchandising movie, with JP a close second, if that means anything. I don't think we can use that to compare with Titantic, I do think DVD and VHS numbers should count since just about ever film has been released on them. If we count them I bet TPM narrows the gap some as Titantic did horrible on DVD, personally I think that shows that interest in it dropped, I think it was a one time thing and came out with perfect timming, it will be hard for any film to do that again.

[Sanis Prent]

Dude...a sinking titanic playset woulda been hella rad!

[Lilaena De'Ville]

He'p me! He'p me! *bubbles rise as little toy figure drowns/freezes to death*


o_O

[JonathanLB]

"Says someone who thought TPM would make $1 billion in the USA alone."

Yeah when I was 14 dude ;)

I was not saying that it's "fair" to ADD merchandise to the box office total, but I am saying that TPM is a more successful film than Titanic overall. Not at the box office, I didn't say it was, but if you just compared it all, if you added every dime together, you'd have a pretty close race still, but ANH and TPM would both beat Titanic, probably the other two SW films would beat it too.

As near as I can tell, SW is somewhere around $10 billion total right now. I'm guessing Titanic hit $2.5 billion.

Actually, JP is not the #2 merchandised film. I do think it is #3 though, that merchandise did very well, I bought a lot of it myself, I was like 10, hehe. I loved that movie.

The Lion King, up until TPM, had the distinction of being the all-time merchandising champ. That shouldn't be TOO big of a surprise given that we are talking about Disney, and I do remember all of these Lion King cards they made (I was big into cards then, but I didn't buy any, I think we got some for my sister).

I wish they would just keep track of ticket sales for movies. AOTC and Spider-Man would be lower, but so be it, it would be the best way to do things. You don't keep track of how much money Britney Spears' last CD made, nobody keeps track of that except the company, we just hear how many COPIES sold, and that's how it should be calculated. They could do that just as easily, it's not any more difficult, and if it were, France and Italy and everywhere else in Europe wouldn't be doing it. But we keep to our idiotic total gross nonsense. It doesn't help now that films are enterting the all-time top ten at like 2 per year, which is just really not very meaningful anymore.

[Lilaena De'Ville]

*prepares a whole line of Titanic bathtub toys* ^_^;