According to Reuters, this year at the San Diego Nerd Prom, Guinness World Records will officially bestow the title "Most Successful Horror Movie Series" onto the Saw franchise.
Admittedly, by "success" Guinness is talking strictly in financial terms. Still, the numbers are impressive. Adjusting dollars for purposes of comparison, we get the following worldwide box office revenues:
Halloween (10 films, including the two Zombie directed remakes) = $366,893,444
Friday the 13th (12 films, including the 2009 remake) = $465,239,523
Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films, including 2010 remake) = $446,590,447
Saw (6 films) = $738,465,450
I don't have a lot of new analysis on this, so I'll just do a quick re-cap of a point I made previously regarding the series. I think the overwhelming, and to many bloggers completely baffling, success of the Saw franchise is mainly a generational thing. Bloggers, by and larger, represent an older generation: the post-boomers, Gen X, whatever you wish to call it. There's is a tiny generation. They were dwarfed by the boomers and now they are vastly outnumbered by the rising generation after them (which is, so far, the largest generation America has ever seen). When we talk about the horror icons that are precious to horror fans from the Slasher Era, we're talking about characters beloved by one of the smallest cohorts of horror filmgoers ever to buy movie tickets. That these same characters dominate criticism on the blogosphere gives them an air of importance and relevance that, in reality, is simply a byproduct of the fact that most bloggers are self-selected representatives of that same tiny cohort. In fact, outside of the clique of '80s horror nostalgists, I suspect these characters just aren't that important to most folks. By contrast, assume that every generation has some minor portion of folks who become horror fans and that this proportion to the larger generation is roughly stable, then you've got a truly massive cohort of horror fans who want their own icons, their own stories. And perhaps that's the real crime of the wealth of remakes and reboots: It robs one generation of its own chance to be a part of a story, instead holding them hostage to the tired, reheated stories of a previous generation.
Admittedly, by "success" Guinness is talking strictly in financial terms. Still, the numbers are impressive. Adjusting dollars for purposes of comparison, we get the following worldwide box office revenues:
Halloween (10 films, including the two Zombie directed remakes) = $366,893,444
Friday the 13th (12 films, including the 2009 remake) = $465,239,523
Nightmare on Elm Street (9 films, including 2010 remake) = $446,590,447
Saw (6 films) = $738,465,450
I don't have a lot of new analysis on this, so I'll just do a quick re-cap of a point I made previously regarding the series. I think the overwhelming, and to many bloggers completely baffling, success of the Saw franchise is mainly a generational thing. Bloggers, by and larger, represent an older generation: the post-boomers, Gen X, whatever you wish to call it. There's is a tiny generation. They were dwarfed by the boomers and now they are vastly outnumbered by the rising generation after them (which is, so far, the largest generation America has ever seen). When we talk about the horror icons that are precious to horror fans from the Slasher Era, we're talking about characters beloved by one of the smallest cohorts of horror filmgoers ever to buy movie tickets. That these same characters dominate criticism on the blogosphere gives them an air of importance and relevance that, in reality, is simply a byproduct of the fact that most bloggers are self-selected representatives of that same tiny cohort. In fact, outside of the clique of '80s horror nostalgists, I suspect these characters just aren't that important to most folks. By contrast, assume that every generation has some minor portion of folks who become horror fans and that this proportion to the larger generation is roughly stable, then you've got a truly massive cohort of horror fans who want their own icons, their own stories. And perhaps that's the real crime of the wealth of remakes and reboots: It robs one generation of its own chance to be a part of a story, instead holding them hostage to the tired, reheated stories of a previous generation.
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