ntt@dciem.UUCP (ntt) (08/11/83)
All lists that I have seen that give the all-time most popular movies are ranked on a basis of gross dollars. Price increases make this standard, well, not too meaningful over long periods. One alternative would be to correct to constant dollars; better yet would be to count the number of admissions to the movie, because this is not affected by inflation of unrelated prices (but how do you count children?). Has anyone ever seen either kind of corrected list in print? I would really like to know where Lucas and Spielberg properly rank (which is not to say I'm not a fan of both, 'cause I am)! decvax!utzoo!dciem!ntt (Mark Brader, NTT Systems Inc., Toronto)
tugs@utcsrgv.UUCP (Stephen Hull) (08/11/83)
Here's another idea for rating poopularity of films:
Take attendance figures and divide by the population for a per capita figure.
Then of course you have an advantage for films that have been around for a long
time, but specifying an arbitrary cutoff time from the film's initial release
would be unfair to films that only got an audience later in their existence,
such as Citizen Kane. So divide by the number of years it's been out,
subtracting years it was withdrawn from circulation. But then you're being
unfair to films which were very-popular-but-I'd-never-bother-to-see-it-again.
Maybe one should be unfair to such films...
steve hull
--
{ linus, ihnp4, allegra, floyd }!utcsrgv!tugs
{ decvax!utzoo, cornell, watmath, uw-beaver, ubc-vision }!utcsrgv!tugs