During World War II, the US and British airforces dropped a number of heavy explosives over Europe (most of them over Germany).
These explosives were believed to be so powerful that they could wipe out an entire city block.
In 1942, a Washington-based publication—The Bellingham Herald—carried a story titled “Those ‘Big, Beautiful’ Bombs Are Called Block Busters By Germans.”
TIME magazine also carried an article in the same year that spoke about the allied forces bombing fascist Italy with bombs called Blockbusters.
Soon the word became a metaphorA figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable for something. for something shocking.
Within a year, the use of Blockbuster in the sense of shocking (and not necessarily a bomb) moved to the movie industry
Its first known use in reference to films was in May 1943, when print advertisements described the film—Bombardier—as “The blockbuster of all action-thrill-service shows!”.
Then in 1944, another trade advertisement praised the war documentary—With the Marines at Tarawa, as one that “hits the heart like a two-ton blockbuster”.
The term Blockbuster fell out of usage soon but was revived in 1948 by Variety magazine, which used the word to refer to big (shockingly big) budget movies.
By the early 1950s, the term became common in the film industry.
And soon, the trade press began referring to any large-scale film that was likely to achieve extraordinary success as a Blockbuster.
