Blockbusters, franchises and the televisionisation of cinema

This paper explores commercial performance of movie blockbusters at the Australian box office since the 1980s (the Multiplex Era) and, to the extent that available data allows, draws comparisons with the performance of big movies before that time. It finds that the share of the box office earned by the very biggest films has fallen sharply since the 1980s. Although there are now more big films at the Australian box office, the very biggest individual films of the Multiplex Era are generally smaller in cinemas than those of the pre-Multiplex Era. But aggregating the box office for movie franchises, and ranking them by their average box office gross per film, we find half of the top 10 are franchises that started in 1999 or later. More than half the box office earned by the Top 20 franchises has been earned in the 2000s. We interpret this as evidence of a significant change in the nature of the story-telling in cinemas. By setting out to tell stories in the cinema by instalment, the most popular cinema of the early 21st century has been 'televisionized'.