f there is no obvious blockbuster to catch at the cinema this holiday season, film fans should look to the past. A book published tomorrow celebrates the history of the biggest-hitting films released in every year since 1930 and reveals what constitutes a winning commercial formula.
The essential ingredients turn out to include dwarfs, robbers, singing nuns, sharks and, more than anything else, ghosts.
Robert Tanitch's book Blockbuster lays out for the first time the chronological story of the biggest box office sensations. His list is accompanied by full credits, an encapsulation of the plot and the titles of the opposition.
While there are many well-known favourites, there are surprises too. For instance, while the sequels Terminator 2 and Home Alone 2 both made the grade in the early Nineties, neither of the original films were the most successful in their year.
'The outstanding films from each year are sometimes a very good indication of their historical moment,' says Tanitch. 'But what is really remarkable is how little the cinema-going public has really changed. They want the same things: disaster, divorce, Dalmatians - in fact, all sorts of cute dogs.'
Action and special effects have always been a huge draw. However, Tanitch believes that certain forms of entertainment have cyclical phases of popularity. The early Fifties was, for example, the era of unbeatable biblical spectaculars, such as Samson and Delilah and Ben-Hur .
Tanitch's list shows that the highest-grossing films each year have fallen into just a few basic categories.
Audiences have always liked to be scared and the most successful horror movies of all time, relative to their competitors, are Dracula in 1930, Frankenstein the next year, and the Fay Wray version of King Kong the following year. The horror movie did not come back into its own until the Seventies when The Exorcist took the crown in 1973 and Jaws followed in its wake in 1975.
Audiences now seem to require an element of comedy if a horror story is to be taken to the bosom of the modern family (such as Ghostbusters and Men in Black ).
The musical, once the soul of Hollywood, also took a severe dip in popularity. The length of the reign of the Technicolor musical is marked out in Tanitch's list by the 1958 Rodgers and Hammerstein hit, South Pacific, and the last flings of Fiddler on the Roof and Grease in the Seventies.
Comedy is now an element in most popular films, but an entirely comic screenplay has rarely written its name all over the box office receipts.
An out-and-out love story, on the other hand, has proved more bankable. Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert started the trend in 1934 with It Happened One Night and in 1939 Gable was back again with Vivien Leigh in Gone with the Wind. There are only four other truly romantic films on his list, including, of course, Love Story in 1970.
There is only one category that confounds analysis. Every few years a movie emerges from the pack which defines its age and knocks others from contention. The identities of these 'mood' movies are among the most interesting of Tanitch's list.
In 1942 we have Mrs Miniver, in which Greer Garson plays the English rose who keeps a stiff upper lip as war rages. Then in 1967 comes The Graduate, and two years later the buddy movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid speaks volumes for the nostalgia of the period.
In 1979 Kramer vs Kramer chronicled the pressures on the modern home front and Dustin Hoffman reappeared with his 1988 movie, Rain Man.
The most pronounced trend, looking back at the past 70 years of blockbusters, is the growing dominance of films made for children, from Walt Disney classics to ET - The Extra Terrestrial in 1981.
Screenwriters have had to adapt to a hard economic truth: they must appeal to a youth audience, or fail to make it big.
Blockbusters is published by Batsford at £14.99
