Great bad movies
Rob Price

"Pirates of the Caribbean; At World's End" opened last week, and my wife and daughter and I caught the 9 p.m. show Sunday night. Our tickets cost $6 each and represent a small fraction of the $140 million the movie earned over the weekend. I'm glad to know our $18 contribution helped, although I think popcorn sales should be the main criterion in calculating movie profits. Popcorn (and soft drinks) generally cost us more than the price of admission. "Well, duh," I hear you say.

All the same, $140 million is a lot of money, especially when you make it over a weekend. You would think "At World's End" must be a pretty good movie to earn that kind of dough. I'm not sure it is a good movie at all; you'll have to see it yourself and make up your own mind. But I do know that the amount of money a movie earns has nothing to do with how good it is.

How do I know this? Because I happen to know that "Gone with the Wind" remains the top moneymaking movie OF ALL TIME if you take inflation into account. According to a nifty website called "Domestic Grosses Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation," "Gone with the Wind" has earned nearly $1.33 billion since it opened in 1939.

What kind of movie is "Gone with the Wind"? It's possibly the worst movie ever made. I remember watching it on TV a year or so ago and calling in my daughter, who was 16 going on 35, to watch some of the memorable scenes.

We watched the ball at Twelve Oaks and the scene in which Scarlett says to Rhett, "You, sir, are no gentlemen" (To which Rhett replies, "And you, Miss, are no lady." I told my daughter the movie perhaps had aged a little but it would get better. Several hours later, we watched Ashley say to Scarlett, "No! No! No! We won't do this!" And at that point my daughter said, "This is really a terrible movie, isn't it?"

"Why, yes," I said. "I just never realized that before."

The point is, it's a terrible movie people have been willing to spend more than a billion dollars on over the last 70 years. People also have spent more than a billion dollars on "Star Wars" (The real "Star Wars," which opened in 1977), and they have spent $937,000,000 on "The Sound of Music." These three movies are the top three money earners in U.S. movie history, once ticket price inflation is taken into account.

They also are basically silly movies. But they are three silly movies my wife and I always stop our nightly channel surfing to watch. Our fondness for "The Sound of Music," in particular, defies all rational thought. We'll flip through the channels, find Julie Andrews singing "Do Re Mi" across Austria, and we'll say, "Okay, we'll just watch this one scene."

And two hours later, we're still watching as the Von Trapp Family Singers outwit the Nazis and Captain Von Trapp sings "Edelweiss" one more time.

"The Sound of Music" earned $159,000 when it opened in 1965. I personally helped a lot, watching the movie 10 or 11 times - in movie theaters, because in those days, children, we didn't have VCRs. How many times will I watch "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End"?

It's difficult to say. Frankly, I left the movie theater in a bit of a narrative fog. Coming after two previous "Pirates," the new movie seems to assume I would remember all the subplots that started in the earlier films. But since these are summer movies, and my brain goes into a sort of coma whenever I watch a summer movie, it's difficult for me to remember the names of the major characters.

Lets see: There was a giant squid and a windmill and a character named Captain Barbossa who died and came back to life. There was aa guy named Davy Jones with lots of tentacles where his face should have been, and there was a chest containing his heart. There were two bad guys in a white wigs, and a ghost ship that jumped out of the ocean and a pirate with an eyeball that kept popping out of its socket.

Does it make much sense to you? I'm afraid I have to take some time and sort things out. Personally, I'd prefer stumbling across Julie Andrews some evening. She'll be singing "My Favorite Things." Ah, it's always a pleasure solving a problem like Maria.