My spirits are lifted with the news that the contents of my blog are becoming common discussions across lunch and dinner tables (I use the word 'common' very, very casually). Keeping that spirit alive, I provide you with another topic that would make for a lovely discussion, possibly even an ice-breaker. So imagine you (being a guy) happen to be loitering around in a bar and notice a pretty looking girl seated alone with a drink in her hand. You step close to her with all the confidence you can muster, politely smile, and to kick start a conversation (and possibly more) ask her, "Which is the fifteenth movie to cross the one billion dollar mark in worldwide ticket receipts?" Intrigued by your deep insightful question, the girl is likely to invite you to sit with her so that you can dazzle her with your knowledge about the happenings of the world. She might even ask you for the first fourteen in the list, so go prepared! Well, if you are the girl and know the answer to the poor bloke's question, it would be really sweet of you to invite him for the drink and let him provide you the question at his own pace. He may not be that geeky after all (highly unlikely though), who knows? Sigh. This blog brings people together!
And the answer to the lately popular question "Which is the fifteenth movie to cross the one billion dollar mark in worldwide ticket receipts?" is... The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. The much coveted and dreamt of "$1 billion" mark is being heard a bit more in recent times as the scale and size of Hollywood is expanding across the oceans into untapped territories of the globe. In fact, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is now the fourth movie of 2012 itself to achieve this feat, after The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises and Skyfall. Wow, what an year 2012 has been! And if you look at the billion-dollar list a bit more closely, only two films in this list were released in the 20th century, Titanic and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Soon maybe the two-billion dollar club would start getting populated. But while it is easy to throw these numbers around and gush at them for a moment, and consider them as banal the other, it is time to see it with some perspective.
So what is one billion dollars? Here is how you could see it. The billion dollars earned by The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey is same as the Gross Domestic Product of Seychelles, an island country in the Indian Ocean housing about 90,000 people. If you were to print a dollar in a minute, you need to make $2.7 million each day to generate one billion dollars in an year, and in comparison The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has made it in less than three months! The President of the United States of America would have to be in power for 2500 years to earn as much as this single movie. Roger Federer could do it quicker by winning 680 Wimbledon titles. And so on and so forth.
To summarize, a billion dollars earned by a single movie is huge. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has had to venture into many territories and seek an adventure befitting Bilbo Baggins, to bring in those revenue numbers. It has collected a cool $300 million in USA, though the weakest domestic collections for a movie of the LOTR franchise. Where it has excelled is the smashing $700 million in the rest-of-the-world sales (across some 30 countries) which gives an idea why studios are so eager to spread their wings across the globe. With a production budget of somewhere between $200 to $250 million being talked about, the producers and the distributor Warner Bros would be delightfully happy, one can assume. And with Peter Jackson having turned this single book into a trilogy, a billion dollar mark is likely what the other two movies of the series would also be chasing! And to think of it, it all began with the story of a ring... my precioussss....
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