The term fell out of usage in the aftermath of World War II but was revived in 1948 by Variety in an article about big budget films. Throughout 19 the term was applied to films such as Bataan, No Time for Love and Brazil. The trade press subsequently appropriated the term as short-hand for a film's commercial potential.
The term was actually first coined by publicists who drew on readers' familiarity with the blockbuster bombs, drawing an analogy with the bomb's huge impact. Another explanation is that trade publications would often advertise the popularity of a film by including illustrations showing long queues often extending around the block, but in reality the term was never used in this way.
However, this practice was outlawed in 1948 before the term became common parlance while pre-1948 high-grossing big-budget spectacles may be retroactively labelled "blockbusters," this is not how they were known at the time. One explanation pertains to the practice of " block booking" whereby a studio would sell a package of films to theaters, rather than permitting them to select which films they wanted to exhibit. Several theories have been put forward for the origin of the term in a film context. Its first known use in reference to films was in May 1943, when advertisements in Variety and Motion Picture Herald described the RKO film, Bombardier, as "The block-buster of all action-thrill-service shows!" Another trade advertisement in 1944 boasted that the war documentary, With the Marines at Tarawa, "hits the heart like a two ton blockbuster." The term began to appear in the American press in the early 1940s, referring to the blockbuster bombs, aerial munitions capable of destroying a whole block of buildings. The term has also come to refer to any large-budget production intended for "blockbuster" status, aimed at mass markets with associated merchandising, sometimes on a scale that meant the financial fortunes of a film studio or a distributor could depend on it. Term for a popular film Queue for Gone with the Wind in Pensacola, Florida (1947)Ī blockbuster is a work of entertainment-typically used to describe a feature film produced by a major film studio, but also other media-that is highly popular and financially successful.
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