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Some of the franchises in the franchise list overlap, resulting in some movies' grosses counting towards multiple franchises. This is not a mistake. The short explanation is that this is how the franchise deals work and how our sources do it.
The citation for 1918's "Mickey" having grossed $8,000,000 is an article from a gossip rag from 1939 stating that producer Mack Sennett once said this was the case, without a source. The only primary source I can find attesting to any box office figure is the book "King of Comedy", which was put together from transcriptions of interviews the producer gave. He states twice that "Mickey" grossed $18,000,000 (once spelled out as eighteen), but also says that he lost all documentation to back this up. I've removed this film from the wiki page "1918 in film", which now lists "Tarzan of the Apes" as the highest grossing film for 1918. I haven't independently verified Tarzan, as accurate box office figures from the early 20th century are difficult to come by, but I can't find any reliable info to justify Mickey's spot here. Nicharis (talk) 23:28, 23 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Box-office data for the silent era is very patchy, and prior to Variety is often dependent on what studios and producers released to the trade press. The higher $18 million is unlikely to be correct (as this would have made it bigger than The Birth of a Nation at the time), so as an WP:EXCEPTIONAL claim would require high level sourcing if we were to re-write history regarding the highest-grossing film of the era. At the end of the day, though, the primary function of Wikipedia is to source facts to secondary sources, not to undertake our own detective work. We have a reliable source citing a figure that is reasonable for a hit film of that era, and nothing (besides the film's own producer) to contradict that. We can't go around removing sourced facts just because we can't find independent corroboration. By all accounts, it seems to have been a hit film, so it seems to be reasonable to include it here, in the absence of a source providing a contradictory figure or a convincing case for another film. Betty Logan (talk) 01:37, 24 August 2024 (UTC)[reply]