The Original Dawn of the Dead from 1978

Dawn of the Dead (1978 movie poster)

I was looking through my “Classics Corner” posts and noticed I’d made terrible blunder. Dawn of the Dead has not been covered yet! So it’s time to rectify that. I’m not going to do a whole lot about the story since I believe most of us have seen it. I will focus on some fun clips and interviews! George A. Romero filmed Dawn of the Dead in the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania. The film stars David Emge, Ken Foree, Scott H. Reiniger, Gaylen Ross and Tom Savini.

One interesting thing is that the estimated budget was $650,000. The opening weekend it made $900,000 in the US on only 68 screens. It went on to gross $55,000,000.00 world wide. Which is an awesome return on investment for the studios (84.6 times more than the production budget). Now let’s compare this to Avatar (picked this because I have more long term data than I would with The Dark Knight Rises). Avatar’s estimated budget was $237,000,000 (364.6 times Dawn of the Dead’s budget), it opened on 3452 screens (3384 more screens) but made $2,782,275,172.00 ( 50.59 times what Dawn of the Dead grossed). If you compare it to the remake, the 2004 version was shot for $28 million and grossed $102,356,381.00 (only 3.66 times the production budget).

Ok…so after that tangent, let’s look at some other interesting facts. One thing that stood out to me when I first watched the movie is when they went in the gun shop in the mall. With the use of movie magic, aka editing, they shot the those scenes in a gun shop in downtown Pittsburgh and cut it in. It is reported that Tom Savini was not happy with how the blood mix filmed, but Romero thought it worked well with the film’s comic book style. It’s also reported that extras in the film were given $20 in case, a Dawn of the Dead tshirt and a box lunch (seem ok to me…just think how much those shirts would be worth today.)

Now for more fun stuff!