looks back at the highest grossing movie in America from every year since 1960. In tracing the evolution of blockbuster cinema, maybe we can answer a question Hollywood has been asking itself for more than a century: What do people want to see?
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Film culture, especially popular film culture, moves in fits and starts. There’s a lot of money on the line, and the people in charge are responsible for making sure that money stays secure. If something works, Hollywood studios figure that it’ll work again. Audiences get used to seeing the things they like, and they’ll go see the fourth movie in a series even if they thought the third one was only okay. This column has covered a lot of boring, uninspired, formulaic drivel. But every once in a while, the energy changes, and the world feels it, like a sudden drop in barometric pressure. A couple of fresh new things capture the public imagination, and the world rearranges itself around those things.