Yes, but what were adjusted box-office receipts 20 years ago?
The all time best films, based upon attendence, not Box Office gross...
Sources do vary;
first citation's listing:
1 Gone with the Wind
1939
2 Star Wars Fox 1977
3 The Sound of Music
1965
4 E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial 1982
5 The Ten Commandments
1956
6 Titanic 1997
7 Jaws 1975
8 Doctor Zhivago
1965
9 The Exorcist 1973
10 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
1937
and a
second citation's listing:
1 Gone with the Wind
2 Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs
3 Star Wars
4 E.T.
5 101 Dalmatians (
1961); was #11 on the above list
6 Bambi (
1947); was #42 on the above list
7 Titanic
8 Jaws
9 The Sound of Music
10 The Ten Commandments
While they differ on specifics, their trends are quite similar: the Golden Age for the Movie Theater was circa 1965 (statistical median).
Torrenting ABSOLUTELY is taking loads of money from movie companies and theater owners.
That's certainly a
hypothesis.
Of course, the Studios have been taking up to 90% of Box Office Gross from the theater owners for decades now. That's basically why the popcorn at the concession stand isn't cheap.
New rentals and ownership through BR and iTunes is a drop in the bucket compared to what movie companies used to make...even just 10 or so years ago.
From the above lists, I do note that there's not a single "Top 10" from 2000 or later. Similarly, I see that the last 30 years only has two films, even though this represents 40% of the timeline...sounds to me like a skew bias may be present.
So if we want to hypthesize that this skew bias was due to significant piracy starting somewhere in this period, then we should also be able to pick a year and see what the technology was present then that would permit it. For example, the youngest of these films was Titanic (1997) is fairly close to its midpoint ... and PCs back then were typically 233MHz, 256MB RAM (if you were lucky) and a <10GB hard disk. If you had a few hundred extra dollars, you could buy a CD-R burner (they broke the $1000 mark in 1995).
YMMV, but it sounds to me that it was far more likely that a movie pirate would try to make an analog copy via a VHS tape copy. This required dubbing it in real time, and due to a copy protection scheme of induced tracking errors also required the addition of an image stabilizer to compensate, in addition to having two VHS decks, which was something that wasn't an utterly trivial expense back then either.
For digital specifically, even if one had the iron, distribution via the Net wasn't there yet: Napster didn't exist until 1999, and BitTorrents weren't invented until 2001. As such, the underrepresentation of 'blockbuster' movie attendences for the 1977-2001 period due to illegal copies appears to be a stretch. Feel free to provide forensic technology to the contrary.
-hh
