20 Coolest Movie World Records

Features
By published

The first 3D flick, the earliest SFX shot, the... youngest director?

Most Special Effects In One Movie

Highest Box Office Film Gross For One Actor

The highest-grossing actor is Samuel L Jackson, whose 68 movies have grossed a total of $7.42 billion (£3.94 billion).

To be fair, he's appeared in several thousand films, including many that made very little money at all.

Earliest Film Shot In Hollywood

The first movie shot in Hollywood, USA was In Old California (USA, 1910), filmed in 1907 when a Chicago production corralled by DW Griffith moved to California looking for good weather to finish the movie. They started in downtown LA but moved north looking for new locations.

Bet the next film shot was a porno.

Longest Film Ever Produced


The longest film ever made was the 85 hour The Cure for Insomnia (USA 1987), directed by John Henry Timmis IV and premiered in its entirety at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA from 31 January to 3 February 1987.

Much of the film consisted of LD Groban reading his own 4,080 page poem, interspersed with scenes of a rock band and what makers describe as some X-rated footage.

Most. Apt. Title. Ever. But it's still easier to sit through than House Of The Dead.

Highest Grossest Single Film

The film with the highest earnings is Titanic, which was released on 19 December 1997 to become the first film to ever take $1 billion at the international box office, with a total gross of $1,834,165,466 (£1,249,388,962).

Further Info It made a record ten week gross of $918.6 million (£574.1 million) worldwide.

It finally closed on 12 September 2001 in Argentina.

Let the "adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind made more" arguments start… now.

Highest Grossing Film Series

The 21 Bond movies, from Dr No (1962) to Casino Royale (2006), have grossed more than $4.49 billion (£2.28 billion) worldwide.

Quantum Of Solace added to that, of course, even though it wasn't as successful as Royale.

First Ever Film Adapted From A TV Show

This is credited to the thriller Dragnet (1954) starring Jack Webb as Sergeant Joe Friday, the role he had created in the NBC TV series, which had then been running for three years and was to continue until 1959.

In 1969 the movie of the TV show was remade as a TV movie. And later, of course, it would become a bigger film starring Dan Aykroyd as Friday. Just the facts, ma'am…

First Ever In-Flight Movie

The first in-flight movie was First National's The Lost World (USA 1925), shown during an Imperial Airway's flight in a converted Handley-Page bomber, from London to Paris in April 1925.

Wonder how they got an entire cinema on to the plane? Oh, wait…

First 3D Film

3D still seems to be managing a comeback - but it's been around a lot longer than you think.

Experiments and shorts aside, the first colour 3-D movie was Bwana Devil (1952), which used the red-green "anaglyph" process first demonstrated as early as 1856.

Most Common Sound Effect

For the 1951 movie Distant Drums, a series of six short sound recordings was made in post-production to accompany the visuals of a soldier being bitten by an alligator and dragged into a stream. The scream effect was archived by Warner Bros. and used exclusively by the studio in a series of movies, including Them! (1954), The Sea Chase (1955) and A Star is Born (1954) before being picked up by sound effects editor Ben Burtt.

Burtt dubbed it the "Wilhelm Scream", after the character in the original movie, and used it in, among others, Star Wars (1977, above) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981). Since then, the scream has been adopted by countless sound engineers and used in films such as Batman Returns (1992), Planet of the Apes ((2001), Madagascar (2005) and, most recently, Norbit (2007). To date, it has featured in at least 133 movies, as well as in computer games and theme park rides.

James White
Freelance Journalist

James White is a freelance journalist who has been covering film and TV for over two decades. In that time, James has written for a wide variety of publications including Total Film and SFX. He has also worked for BAFTA and on ODEON's in-cinema magazine.