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Q: Where does the word "blockbuster" come from?

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Author: 
Adam Thomlison / TV Media

The war picture has been a mainstay at the box office, but it had a real (although grim) heyday in the 1940s during World War II. Hollywood was cranking out loads of them to get people on board for the war effort and to bring some of those real-life happenings to the home front.

The term "blockbuster" comes from that period and comes from a type of large bomb, in use at the time, nicknamed a block-buster, so called because it was powerful enough to destroy an entire city block.

Towards the end of the war, when details of military activities had been dominating the news for literal years, the Hollywood press started sneaking the term in as a metaphor to suggest that certain war pictures were incredibly powerful in their own way.

Film historian Sheldon Hall has looked extensively into this. The first case he found was in a 1943 advertisement for a movie called "Bombardier," about hotshot bomber pilots in the war. The ad borrowed from the subject matter to describe the film as, "The block-buster of all action-thrill-service shows!"

The next year, an ad for the documentary "With the Marines at Tarawa," another war movie (not a bombing-specific movie this time), said that, "It hits the heart like a two ton blockbuster." 

By the late '40s, the term was being applied to non-war pictures with similar potential potency, and an industry term was born. By the time of Hollywood's true blockbuster era (which most say began with 1975's "Jaws"), not to mention the now-defunct video-rental chain, the term was well established in the biz.

Confusingly, the opposite concept -- an expensive movie that did poorly at the box office -- is called a bomb. This seems to be a totally separate thing and derives from a wider definition of "to bomb" as meaning "to fail."

 

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