The blockbuster age, it’s usually said, began with the release of “Jaws” and “Star Wars.” But you could argue that the blockbuster mentality didn’t fully kick in until ordinary moviegoers began to fixate on the question of what was doing well (or not) at the box office.
It’s hard to hang that development on any particular date or movie, but it probably coincided with the rise of “Entertainment Tonight”, the first show to beam the weekend box-office report into a jillion homes, and the one that popularized the winners-and-losers, here’s-what’s-number-one! school of breathless inside-Hollywood-for-the-masses financial babble.It didn’t take long for other media outlets, notably newspapers, to pick up on it.
The weekend box-office report soon became a national spectator sport, a way for all of America to look into the world of movies and decide who was up and who was down.
The
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