The year is edging toward summer, the season for blockbuster movie releases. One of the seasons, at least; another raft of the things shows up around Christmastime. Take a look at the Hollywood movies of years ago, though, and you’ll notice that the business has changed drastically. In the 1920s and 1930s, studios cranked out lots more movies than they do today, but none of them were expected to pull in huge opening weekend box office receipts, or earn hundreds of millions of dollars (not to mention billions). The credits showed maybe a dozen people involved in a given film — nothing like the hundreds or thousands you see crawling up the screen today. To be clear, most of the credited folks in a modern blockbuster are working on things like computer graphics that didn’t exist a century ago.
Television took the place of the movie production industry of the 30s, of course, but there just might be an etymological factor in play here as well. Maybe one reason there weren’t any blockbusters filmed back then is because the word “blockbuster” didn’t exist.
It all has to do with World War II and the arms race to pack more destructive power into portable delivery systems like bombs. Airplane development went so fast that bombers got bigger, more powerful, and continually increased their cargo capacity. Where the biggest bombs weighted hundreds of pounds at the beginning of the conflict, it wasn’t long before bigger bombers could carry bigger bombs weighing thousands of pounds.
Thousands of pounds of explosive, delivered in the right place (which only ever happened by chance, but that’s another story) can bring down a large city building. In European cities, “block” doesn’t mean quite the same thing as in the US. Here we think of a “city block”, which is most often a number of buildings surrounded by streets. But in European cities, a “block” means a single large building containing multiple offices or shops or apartments. The kind of thing you could demolish from thousands of feet in the air by dropping a 4000-pound bomb on it.
Once all the pieces were in place, the term “blockbuster” very quickly became the term attached to those bombs. Here’s an example from 1943: “Bombs were falling..many 8,000 lb. and 4,000 lb. ‘block~busters’ among them.”
It took about a decade after the war was over for “blockbuster” to begin to be used the way we understand it today: “One day I had what seemed to me like a blockbuster of an idea for a musical play” (1957). And who knows; maybe another blockbuster was an idea for a revamped movie industry releasing far fewer movies but (they hope) making a lot more money from each one. After all, once you have a good word, you start looking around for ways to use it. It’s really the same thing when you have a perfectly good magical school, or mysterious energy source in a galaxy far, far away, or a stack of comic book characters in need of a new medium.
