Avatar still only #26 when box office receipts are adjusted for inflation
boxofficemojo.com
boxofficemojo.com
In 1939 the population of the US was only 130millon, and a large portion was rural, which meant they had poorer access to theaters. This makes the returns of Gone with the Wind that much more impressive (although of course TVs/misc. entertainment devices didn't exist, which compete against movies.)
Perhaps a good way to measure the success a of a movie would be the percentage of the population that has seen it.
But yeah, if you want to gauge the popularity of the movie, the best measure is probably something along the lines of tickets sold per capita.
Not really. 1946 tickets per capita in the US: 34. 2004: 5.
There's no way to do this right. Box office "records" don't mean anything, no matter how many variables you take into account.
Actually I think this is the most relevant point. People used to go to the cinema a lot more before TV. Also movies didn't 'go to DVD' so I'm guessing that the most popular ones could run for years and years.
Why? Everybody I know here in Taipei who saw it saw it in 3D. Is 3D exceptionally popular in the US or something?
Gone with the Wind: unadjusted in 1939: $198,676,459
"adjusted" for 1939: $ 46,470,300
As a matter of personal preference I'm more interested in worldwide grosses.
(Not a US citizen)
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/
However, inflation-adjustment is harder for the worldwide figure since inflation varies by country and you'd need to know the individual grosses for each one. [Edit: actually, is that true if the figures are in USD?]
1. Gone with the Wind - $3.04 billion 2. Titanic - $2.34 billion 3. A New Hope - $2.24 billion 4. E.T. - $1.93 billion 5. The Sound of Music - $1.92 billion 6. Jaws - $1.73 billion
As of this post, Avatar is 2.05 billion and climbing. Will it be the most watched movie of all time worldwide (in theaters), or will Gone with the Wind retain its dominance? *Data taken from boxofficemojo.com.
The biggest issue though with comparing a movie that came out a month ago with a movie that came out 80 years ago is that movie has had 80 years of releases and re-releases in which to make that sum. It would be much more fair to compare everything to how it did in the first month of availability (though even then you have problems with judging how widely distributed a movie was initially). Also, the site doesn't make clear if, when taking into account re-releases, they adjust everything at the price level of the original release or if they judge each re-release at the new price level.
In the end, though, any sort of historical comparison is a silly exercise that tells us little.
That being said, I don't know how much their calculations should be trusted, as they claim to use $7.35 as the ticket price for 2009 as well as 2010, but show Avatar's 562MM as adjusted up from 555MM starting in 2009 dollars.
But of course, many people won't believe something just because it's not in print.
My guess is that the opposite is true. Large LCD and plasma screens with 5.1 Surround Sound and DVD/Bluray make cinema less attractive than what it was 12 years ago.
The rule of thumb is that over the course of a typical film, the distributor will receive about 55% of box office gross. Foreign deals can differ a fair amount.
Each deal is different, and it's hard to say what any one film gets without some insider info.
Then there's the cost of the film. There's not been a firm number on Avatar's production costs. High 200s is a good guess, but it's a guess.
P&A (prints and advertising) can be a huge cost on something like Avatar, though it had fewer prints than a typical blockbuster. Advertising was certainly substantial, though. I suspect 100 million is actually low.
Cameron's share is likely defined to come after some sort of breakeven point, some minimum number the studio beancounters said had to come back to the studio. There's really no standard whatsoever for someone like Cameron though, so who knows.
It's also important to remember that a lot of a film's production cost is really just the studio paying itself. Soundstage rental. Grip trucks, costuming, blah blah blah. Money moving from one column to another.
Avatar probably didn't qualify for any tax credits, though some films get really amazing deals. Some come close to having half their budgets in transferable tax credits, depending on the state or locale they shoot in. Those tax credits can be sold for cash and can considerably lower the cost to a studio.
The traditional hope for an average film has been to break even on box office, profit on the ancillaries - dvd, tv, etc. But with DVD sales dropping, that model will need some adjustment.
Avatar, though, is probably pretty close to some definition of profit in theatrical release.
And all that billion plus dollars is cash flow. Which is king, as much in Hollywood as it is anywhere else.
If tomorrow we had hyper-inflation and a bus ticket cost 1 million dollars, would anyone still be impressed by a billion dollars in profit? Would the mediocre comedies netting trillions at the box office be given the title of "most profitable movie" of all time?
A dollar in 1977 had the buying power of somewhere between 3 to 4 dollars now. $1/3 billion profit in 1977 dollars is a significantly smaller number.
Still, it has to do about 30% better than Titanic (which did well overseas), so it has a ways to go.