Box Office Boff: Top Stars' Drawing Power

N E W   Y O R K, June 21 -- Movie buffs consider the 1970s to be a golden age of American movies, with an abundance of classics like The Godfather, Annie Hall and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

But starting with Jaws in 1975, the '70s also ushered in the era of the summer blockbuster — movies released on thousands of screens all over the country simultaneously.

Since then, the general public and not just Hollywood players have become increasingly fixated on box office grosses — a phenomenon that continues to this day.

As the summer movie season kicks into high gear, we tracked the top stars of the generation. We divided the post-Jaws era into five five-year periods and ranked the stars by the total gross of their top three movies. To be eligible for our list, an actor had to have starred in at least two hit movies (box-office gross of at least $60 million) in that period.

(Han) Solo Encore

How do you become the biggest movie star of all time?

Easy, just hitch your wagon to an even brighter star — as in Star Wars. This was the technique followed by Harrison Ford, who was unknown before he played Han Solo in what became the second-most popular movie of all time, after Gone With The Wind.

Ford played Solo again in The Empire Strikes Back. Those two movies alone grossed a total of $751.5 million, a five-year total that has not been surpassed to this day, even without adjusting the earlier-year grosses for inflation. (We did not rank Mark Hamill or Carrie Fisher, who also starred in Star Wars, on the ground that neither has starred in a hit picture since then).

Ford was trailed distantly by another then-new face, John Travolta, and by Burt Reynolds, who was at the end of his time as top player. The 1976-to-1980 period was particularly testosterone-intensive — as not a single actress appeared in more than one hit movie. Here are the top stars for that period and the total gross of their top three films (in current dollars).

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