How Did Science Fiction and Fantasy Become the Most Beloved Forms of Cinema?

Does anybody else find it a bit odd that science fiction and fantasy films completely dominate the international box office, that these are the movies that cinemagoers choose to watch above all other kinds of movies by a massive margin, particularly as these genres are not seen as "cool"?



If you look up the top-50 highest grossing films of all time, my counting may be off by a few:

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Science Fiction: 19 movies, including 7 CBMs

Fantasy: 18 movies

Adult Drama: 1 movie, Titanic

Action: 2 movies, Skyfall, Fast and Furious 6

Talking Animals / Cartoons: 10 movies, Frozen, Toy Story 3, The Lion King, Despicable Me 2, Finding Nemo, Shrek 2, Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, Ice Age: Continental Drift, Shrek 3.



Note that I counted talking animals / cartoon as a separate category, but really movies like Shrek 2 that could fall under fantasy as well. So all in all, the public prefers scifi/fantasy to other forms of cinema by a massive margin. These are the most popular movies, and they probably consume the plurality or even the majority of worldwide grosses. The trend is contributing, of the top-15 2013 movies, only Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity counts as an "adult drama", though some would put it under science fiction. The Wolf of Wall Street comes in in 17th place.



I note that this is not because of brands. Even if one removes comic book movies, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, Twilight, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, Transformers, and Hunger Games (where removing all that is nonsensical and intellectually dishonest), the top-50 worldwide still includes 7 scifi/fantasy movies: Avatar, Jurassic Park, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, Independence Day, ET: The Extraterrestrial, and 2012, which easily trounces the 1 "adult drama" of Titanic, which BTW was made by a science fiction director with those kinds of sensibilities.



In positions 51-100, I see Gravity, Forest Gump, Mamma Mia!, The Passion of the Christ, Hangover Part II as going against the trend, so that's really not much at all, and both Gravity and The Passion of the Christ could be argued to respectively be science fiction and fantasy films.



I'll close my post by saying that it wasn't always this way, for the 1960s:

The Sound of Music (1965)

101 Dalmatians (1961)

The Jungle Book (1967)

Doctor Zhivago (1965)

The Graduate (1967) (tie)

Mary Poppins (1964) (tie)

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)

My Fair Lady (1964)

Thunderball (1965)

Funny Girl (1968)

Cleopatra (1963)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) (tie)

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967) (tie)

Goldfinger (1964)



and for the 1970s:

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Star Wars (1977)

Jaws (1975)

The Exorcist (1973)

Grease (1978)

The Sting (1973)

Saturday Night Fever (1977)

(National Lampoon's) Animal House (1978)

The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)

The Godfather (1972)

Superman (1978)

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977/80)

Smokey and the Bandit (1977)

Blazing Saddles (1974)

Rocky (1976)

The Towering Inferno (1974)

American Graffiti (1973)

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

Love Story (1970) (tie)

Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) (tie)



So there once was greater diversity in film preferences, but nowadays the public is really only interested in science fiction and fantasy.