Thread by @MrGoldstein7

You might think Avatar or Avengers:Endgame was the most popular movie of all time, based on box office totals. Or that Gone with the Wind was the most popular of all time. But neither one is even close to being the truly most popular, based on number of tickets sold.

They want you to think Gone with the Wind is the most popular, because of course it was huge propaganda about the Civil War, selling mainstream history. As such, they promoted it far beyond anything at the time, leaving it in theaters for more than three years.

It came out in late 1939, but was still on the charts in 1942. It wasn't re-released in those years like Star Wars later was, it was just left in theaters the entire time.

It is still being promoted online in mainstream lists, selling it as the highest-grossing film of all time adjusted for inflation. And it did far out-perform Avatar, Avengers, or Titanic.

According to the-numbers com, Avatar sold 98.6 million tickets in the US. Gone with the Wind sold 178.9 million, almost twice as much. But they are lying when they say it was the top-grossing film of all-time, inflation adjusted, since it isn't even close.

I guess they have to lie because the truth is too embarrassing.
And no, the answer isn't The Sound of Music, though that film sold 161.6 million tickets. And the answer isn't Star Wars, which only sold 87.77 million in its initial release.

The answer is that Gone with the Wind was crushed by two Disney animated films of the same period: Bambi and Pinocchio.

But that still doesn't tell the whole story about the popularity of those movies, since it doesn't include a major factor they always leave out, even when adjusting for inflation or looking at tickets sold. It leaves out the number of people in the country at the time.

At the time of Avatar, it was about 308 million. In 1940 it was 132 million, an increase of 2.33x. So to judge the popularity of a movie we have to include that factor in our math, because we need to know the number of tickets sold relative to the number that could have been sold

Only by running that math can we see how many people are staying home from the movies these days. If we do that, we get this list:

You can see why they bury this information, because it is so embarrassing. It proves that Bambi was almost seven times more popular than Avatar. Avatar is not the most popular, it is the 58th most popular. Avengers is #82.

Twelve old Disney movies were far more popular than Avatar or Avengers: Endgame. Avengers barely beat Animal House. Billy Jack was more popular than Avengers. The Shaggy Dog was more popular than Avatar, and so was a film you have probably never heard of: Mom and Dad.

Mom and Dad was a sex hygiene film from 1945 with no stars. It was shot in six and days and cost 67,000 to produce. And yet a greater percentage of the US population paid to see it than Avatar. Remember, Avatar cost almost half a billion to make and promote.

Why am I telling you this? Mainly because I find it amusing. But also because it plays into my larger critique of Hollywood and Modern civilization. It shows that these people aren't even trying to give the audience what it wants.

Instead, they are doing their best to corrupt us, spending more money each decade to do so. But it isn't working. You can see from that chart that the percentage of people going to theaters is dropping every decade, and has been since the 1940s.

Real people simply aren't interested in the garbage Hollywood is putting out, and they are less interested every year.

Even Disney has forgotten how to make movies. It had already gone of the beam by 1991 with Beauty and the Beast, which I now see as a turning point. Disney was trying to return to past glory, but it was a complete miscalculation. Despite all the 5-star reviews, it was unwatchable

It was loud, hyperactive, and obnoxious in every way. All subtlety in pacing, characterization, and even animation had gone out the window. It is as if they were trying to substitute speed and volume for a real script. This has been the trend in all movies since then.

It also applies to The Lion King, the only later Disney animated film that made our list here. It isn't as hyperactive as Beauty and the Beast, but is in many ways more obnoxious. The script has a slimy Modern feel—shallow, plastic, and preachy.

It has that cloying, self-satisfied air that is the scent and hallmark of the contemporary American. The jokes are smarmy, the cliches abound, and every character is off-putting in his or her own generalized way.

It is difficult to really put your finger on what is so revolting about the modern human until it is distilled and packaged and perfected by Disney in this way. Only by transporting our awful personalities into animals can the true horror of them be appreciated.

As an example, the first scene of The Lion King is a baboon with a staff arriving to baptize the new cub. Why would a lion need to be baptized by a baboon? There is something really icky about the idea, though most people seem to have missed it.

All the animals are bowing to the lions, or dropping curtsies. Icky again, since I thought we had quit kings and all the bowing to them. So why is it being promoted here?

Zazu flies in to scold Scar for not being at the christening. Zazu is supposed to be a hornbill. They have nothing to do with lions in real life. Scar is torturing a mouse, but lions don't eat mice. Scar then tries to eat Zazu, but lions don't eat hornbills either.

It is all so Mufasa and his brother Scar can growl at eachother. The next scene is a long one with Mufasa lecturing to Simba about how the world works. Just what we need this early in the film right, a long exposition.

We soon get to plenty of action, but is only so these sick scriptwriters have Simba's father Mufasa killed in front of him. To make it worse, the young Simba is told it was his fault. Could anything be more traumatizing to children having to watch this?

Bambi was bad enough, but this is a thousand times worse, on purpose. You can now understand why they named the brother Scar. The scriptwriters are intentionally scarring their young audience.

And that was scarring, not scaring, though they are doing both, to prepare them for the long PTSD life ahead of them created by the Phoenicians. So the film reads as both a result and a cause of widespread—and one might say generalized—mental illness.

It could hardly get worse, but somehow they found a way in the 2019 CGI remake. About the only thing good about the original was the traditional animation, which really was beautiful in places. It showed that some few still exist who can draw and render in the old style.

But the remake dispenses with all that in the name of realism, creating a film ten times more scary than the original. It is scarier not only in the immediacy of it, but in the sense of unease it creates from the first scene.

And now for the cherry on top: a CGI remake of Bambi is in the works. I am sure they will find a way to make it far more traumatizing for children than the original. Maybe they can hire a pedophile uncle to accompany each and every child to the theater.

You will say my critique always applied to Disney films, which have been meretricious and noisy from the start. And although that is true to some extent, it misses my point. Disney films—for all their flaws—didn't have that modern stink until the 1980s or 90s.

70s films like The Love Bug were manic, but they didn't have that plastic posing modern feel that all films now have.

And I recommend you compare late Disney films to 60s films like Pollyanna or The Three Lives of Thomasina, both of which were miracles of restraint and subtlety compared to newer movies.

They seem to come out of another world altogether than the world that produced Aladdin or The Emperor's New Groove.

This is the same reason the successful period piece is nearly extinct, and will soon probably be impossible. Modern actors simply can't play those parts anymore, because they have been brought up with too much attitude.

Every strut and turn of the head cries out “spoiled modern baby”. Think Robert Downey trying to play Sherlock or Kristen Stewart trying to play. . . anyone. The spirit revolts.

But all is not lost. Many seem to still appreciate the old movies, but the new writers and producers—as well as their audiences—can't seem to comprehend the charm of them, or the charm of the pre-modern person.

That is to say, the modern person can't understand why and how these old actors and movies have charisma, while they have none. How was it accomplished? Could it be accomplished again?

It could, but it would require a complete re-education. It would require jettisoning the entire trainwreck we call contemporary culture and starting over.

It would require ditching all of modernity as a gross error in judgment and returning to a simpler, more direct time, where attitude counted for nothing and substance was everything.

You will say that time never existed, which strictly is true, but it was nearer existing in the past than it is now. Hollywood was always false, but it gets falser every decade.

Modernity is defined by an ever accelerating dive into coolness, inflection, hipness, and surface. It is an abandonment of all individuality for a pretense of individuality which is really no more than a hiding in type.

It is the selection of a category, more than anything, in order to hide in one group or another as protection. “Expression” is the shibboleth, but almost no one has anything to express except one or another fashion disaster they have learned from TV.

And this doesn't just apply to their clothing, it applies just as much to their speech and thought, which is a TV speech and a TV thought. Everyone is aping some ape, and therefore can never transcend apishness.

But under this unctuous veneer and varnish, we are what we have always been, which is why we retain the ability to respond to these old movies.

Although we mirror and are mirrored by the grotesque characters in current films, we still prefer the characters of old, who we can see have some charm we lack. They are altogether more quiet, reserved, subtle, and nuanced. They are more elevated and less needy.

They can support a slower pacing, because they can fill the empty spots with character. They don't have to rely on intrusive scores, narration, camera tricks, quick edits, or CGI, because they have something better: a cohesive script.

And outside of film, people in the old days had something similar to a cohesive script: it was called a morality. They believed in something beyond a wage and a pose. They had studied something other than the stock market or The New York Times or the Netflix schedule.

They got their information from old books, not from some propped-up monstrosity on CNN.