It is impossible to answer this one as figures on who has watched a film would be impossible to collect. Hollywood likes to talk about money grossed rather than bums in seats (or indeed any quantative measure of enjoyment). So although the highest grossing film is Titanic, at $600 million, how does this compare with the $6 million grossed by Chaplin's The Gold Rush, in real terms a film grossing this amount in 1925 must have been a contender for the title.

In the 88 years it's been in existance many millions must have enjoyed Chaplin's capers - on TV, VHS and DVD as well as many cinema showing over the years. Titanic a mere 15 years old cannot have had viewing figues to match.

This is of course all mere speculation.

The following list is of the 150 top-grossing films that were first screened at least 20 years before Titanic - this list of classics must surely contain many films that have been watched more times than the 1997 blockbuster.

1915 The Birth Of A Nation
1916 Intolerance
1921 The Kid
1922 Nosferatu
1924 Greed
1924 Sherlock Jr.
1925 The Gold Rush
1926 The General
1927 Metropolis
1927 Sunrise
1928 The Crowd
1928 The Passion of Joan of Arc
1930 All Quiet On The Western Front
1931 City Lights
1931 M
1932 Trouble in Paradise
1933 42nd Street
1933 Duck Soup
1933 King Kong
1934 It Happened One Night
1935 A Night At The Opera
1935 Bride of Frankenstein
1935 Top Hat
1936 Modern Times
1937 Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs
1938 Bringing Up Baby
1938 The Adventures of Robin Hood
1939 Gone With The Wind
1939 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
1939 Ninotchka
1939 Stagecoach
1939 The Wizard of Oz
1939 Wuthering Heights
1940 Fantasia
1940 His Girl Friday
1940 Rebecca
1940 The Grapes of Wrath
1940 The Great Dictator
1940 The Philadelphia Story
1941 Citizen Kane
1941 The Lady Eve
1941 The Maltese Falcon
1942 Casablanca
1942 The Magnificent Ambersons
1942 Yankee Doodle Dandy
1944 Double Indemnity
1944 Meet Me In St. Louis
1946 It's A Wonderful Life
1946 My Darling Clementine
1946 Notorious
1946 Notorious
1946 The Best Years of Our Lives
1946 The Big Sleep
1947 Out Of The Past
1948 Bicycle Thieves
1948 Letter From an Unknown Woman
1948 Red River
1948 Rope
1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
1949 Kind Hearts and Coronets
1949 The Third Man
1950 All About Eve
1950 Rashomon
1950 Sunset Boulevard
1951 A Streetcar Named Desire
1951 An American In Paris
1951 Strangers on a Train
1951 The African Queen
1952 High Noon
1952 Ikiru
1952 Singin' in the Rain
1952 The Quiet Man
1953 Roman Holiday
1953 Shane
1953 Stalag 17
1953 The Wages of Fear
1953 Tokyo Story
1954 A Star Is Born
1954 Dial M for Murder
1954 La strada
1954 On The Waterfront
1954 Rear Window
1954 Seven Samurai
1955 Les Diaboliques
1955 Rebel Without a Cause
1955 The Night of the Hunter
1956 The Killing
1956 The Searchers
1957 12 Angry Men
1957 Nights of Cabiria
1957 Paths of Glory
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai
1957 The Seventh Seal
1957 Throne of Blood
1957 Wild Strawberries
1957 Witness for the Prosecution
1958 Touch of Evil
1958 Vertigo
1959 Anatomy of a Murder
1959 Ben-Hur
1959 North By Northwest
1959 Some Like It Hot
1959 The 400 Blows
1960 Psycho
1960 The Apartment
1961 Judgement at Nuremberg
1961 The Hustler
1961 West Side Story
1961 Yojimbo
1962 Harakiri
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1962 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance
1962 The Manchurian Candidate
1962 To Kill a Mockingbird
1963 8½
1963 High and Low
1963 The Great Escape
1964 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1965 For a Few Dollars More
1966 Persona
1966 The Battle of Algiers
1966 The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
1966 Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
1967 Bonnie And Clyde
1967 Cool Hand Luke
1967 The Graduate
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey
1968 Once Upon a Time in the West
1968 Rosemary's Baby
1969 Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
1969 Easy Rider
1969 Midnight Cowboy
1969 The Wild Bunch
1971 A Clockwork Orange
1972 The Godfather
1973 The Exorcist
1973 The Sting
1974 Chinatown
1974 The Godfather: Part II
1975 Barry Lyndon
1975 Dog Day Afternoon
1975 Jaws
1975 Monty Python and the Holy Grail
1975 Nashville
1975 One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
1976 Network
1976 Rocky
1976 Taxi Driver
1977 Annie Hall
1977 Star Wars
1977 Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope