Blockbuster motion picture

The term blockbuster was originally defined by a large audience response. After a while the term came to mean a high-budget production aimed at mass markets, with associated merchandising, on which the financial fortunes of a film studio or a distributor depended. It was defined by its production budget and marketing effort rather than its success and popularity, and was essentially a tag which a film's marketing gave itself.

The term began to appear in the American press in the early 1940s, referring to aerial bombs capable of destroying a whole block of streets. Later, the term began to be used to refer to successful theater plays, hit movies, best selling novels, and computer games.

In film, a number of terms were used to describe a hit. In the 1970s these included: "spectacular" (The Wall Street Journal), "super-grosser" (New York Times), and "super-blockbuster" (Variety). In 1975 the usage of "blockbuster" for films coalesced around Steven Spielberg's Jaws and became perceived as something new: a cultural phenomenon, a fast-paced exciting entertainment, almost a genre. Audiences interacted with such films, talked about them afterwards, and went back to see them again just for the thrill.

Before Jaws set box office records in the summer of 1975, successful films, such as Quo Vadis, The Ten Commandments, Gone With the Wind, and Ben-Hur, were called blockbusters based purely on the amount of money earned at the box office. Jaws is regarded as the first film of New Hollywood's "blockbuster era" with its current meaning, implying a film genre. It also consolidated the "summer blockbuster" trend, through which major film studios and distributors planned their entire annual marketing strategy around a big release by July 4.

Jaws exceeded $100,000,000 in ticket sales and for a time this was the point at which a film could be designated a blockbuster in North America. However earlier films such as Gone With the Wind (1939) and The Sound of Music (1965) easily passed this threshold.

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