This is one of the more interesting pages on Box Office Mojo. It's their "alltime records" page. If you just go through and look at the months, you can see top thirty films of all time. It makes you wonder the strategizing that goes into setting release dates. What is it, really, about May that makes it such an important month for blockbusters? Is it school ending, like I suggested? I mean, teenagers and schoolage children are a big demographic, and as real incomes have grown over the past thirty to forty years, presumably disposable income within families have grown. More than likely, that translates into higher allowances for teens and tweens. So this might explain why you see these changes in release patterns over time. I don't know, but I think that it was beginning with Jaws that the potential of the "summer blockbuster" was realized. But I wonder to what degree did that date just sit there, untapped? A year, two years, ten years, fifty years? How long before Hollywood realized that they could take advantage of whatever factors existed during these beginning weeks of summer? Reading Biskind's book, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, I get the sense that everyone was a bit surprised by the strength of Jaws during its run.
Posted by scott at March 1, 2004 05:33 PM | TrackBackI don't know either, but at first glance I would think that by the mid-late seventies the children of Baby Boomers were old enough to have their own spending money. You mentioned a rise in disposable income; I think that's a plausible, though totally unscientific, explanation.
Posted by: stoddart at March 1, 2004 06:26 PM