Gathered here is a collection of some of the most entertainingly cheap and endearingly bad movies ever made. Although John Carpenter’s Halloween is a great example of a superbly made “B movie” in terms of budget, any film fan has most likely seen it already. Whenever possible, I tried to keep the list to more obscure titles. If these 100 films are painful, they’re also equally fun. They’re not on this list, because the meaning of “best” here is “most entertaining,” and I defy you to be entertained by Manos without its MST3k commentary or a pound of medical-grade marijuana.
Instead, discerning film fans are able to simply appreciate them for what they are.īut what does “best” mean when we’re talking about films often famous for their shoddy construction? It certainly doesn’t mean “best-made.” It also doesn’t mean “worst-made,” or else films like Manos: The Hands of Fate and The Beast of Yucca Flats would make prominent appearances. To compare them with A movies in terms of resources and immersiveness isn’t a fair proposition.
For every high-budget “A movie” that commands significant promotion and funding from its studio, there are piles of B movies that scratch and claw their way into existence without the benefit of things like “a budget” or “a script” in some cases. The business of making movies would never be the same again.Not every film can be the Citizen Kane of its day. Then “Superman” (1978) brought licensed content to life, racking up a record-breaking final budget of $55 million in the process, but still ending up one of the highest grossing films of the decade. See who came out on top on our list of box office stars, every year since 1945. (Star power helped sell films, too, of course. Spielberg and Lucas may be household names now, but they were 27 and 33 respectively when they changed the film industry forever. “Jaws” (1975) invented the big-budget summertime smash hit, only to see “Star Wars” (1977) nearly double its domestic ticket sales.
#HIGHEST GROSSING MOVIES OF THE 70S MOVIE#
The actors and directors for each movie are from IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon.īy the mid-1970s, studios were targeting younger, less sophisticated patrons. Box office figures are not inflation adjusted. Rankings were out of 4,230 movies for which data was available. To identify the biggest box office hits of the 1970’s, 24/7 Tempo reviewed box office data from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services, last updated in April 2021.
Studios began releasing movies almost exclusively on Friday nights to get the most they could out of weekend audiences, and “opening weekend” box office receipts became the ultimate measure of cinematic success.Ĭlick here to see the biggest box office hits of the 1970s Advances in advertising, marketing, and distribution techniques addressed the new threat of cable television. The changes in the film world weren’t only creative. (To see how the nature of what we watch has evolved over time, see the 100 best movies of the last 100 years, according to critics. Viewers were treated to revolutionary visual effects that turned science fiction and horror into genres to be taken seriously by mainstream audiences and critics alike. It saw the groundbreaking pioneers of the “New Hollywood” come of age. It saw the birth of the blockbuster and the “Star Wars” phenomenon. The 1970s breathed new life into the American film industry.