You can make a guess for how things held up in the past by looking at some of the Google Books datasets, though that does have some problems. One problem is tha

You can make a guess for how things held up in the past by looking at some of the Google Books datasets, though that does have some problems. One problem is that it's completely unnormalized (the proportion of the dataset that is made up of different kinds of books changes over time), and another is that you can't really search for movie titles that are also names of anything else, or common English words, without getting other stuff in the results. But with those caveats it can be fun to play around with: http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Birth+of+a+Nation%2CCitizen+Kane%2CThe+Big+Parade%2CGet+Carter&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=10&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Birth+of+a+Nati...