[freddie_mercury]

What's more movies get privileged in a weird way over other things. Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.

Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (2019) made $600 million in the first 72-hours, far more than any movie ever. League of Legends makes $1.4 billion a year, again more than any movie ever made. Fortnite makes $2.4 billion.

In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.

Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

[thaumasiotes]

> Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion and is the highest grossing film of all time. Only 5 films ever have broken $2 billion.

> Phantom of the Opera the musical has made $6 billion, blowing Avengers out of the water. Wicked the musical has grossed $3 billion, more than any movie ever made. Same for Mamma Mia!.

> In the UK, more people watched The X Factor than Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The book Diary of a Wimpy Kid sold over a million copies in its latest installment.

> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

The first metric you mention is not the right one for discussing cultural impact. You'd want to compare number of tickets sold for Phantom of the Opera to number of tickets sold for Avengers: Endgame.

Weirdly, you go on to make the correct comparison for The X Factor.

I'm not convinced that popular video games haven't made their way into the conversations about cultural significance.

[tanilama]

> Yet none of those things enter conversations about cultural affinity in the same way movies do.

Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?

I would argue movies have built an establishment of critics around itself, the disclosure surrounding it does appear to be more sophisticated and intellectual. But that doesn't mean the it is shaping the audience's perception the same way.

[krapp]

>Really? What cultural affinity is there for Avengers? For Force Awakens?

The Avengers is a part of a comic franchise that is almost 50 years old, and Star Wars basically invented the science fiction movie blockbuster over 40 years ago. Both have been deeply influential on generations of people and on the way their respective genres have been portrayed in all media.

To question whether there is cultural affinity for either is to fundamentally misunderstand modern Western pop culture, because these properties are more influential to it than the Bible and Shakespeare.