Adjusted all time Box office.

[Marcus Telcontar]

http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted/



Could you imagine how big Gone with The Wind must have been???????

[ReaperFett]

that's the good ole proper list :)

good to see Armageddon at 101 too

[JonathanLB]

MAN, that list has changed a ton since the last time I saw it! Not the order, no no, but last time I saw neither ANH nor GWTW were over $1 billion. Haha, that is really incredible.

The ticket sales list is what I like the most, but obviously it is just the same as the adjusted gross list in order, it's just that I really like being able to see the number of tickets sold.

I think for Titanic it was about 130 million, for ANH it was 169.9 million, GWTW was somewhere above that like almost 190 million?

Oh also, to appease fans of both lists, I like to do it this way:

Adjusted rank + unadjusted rank / 2.

So for Titanic you get 7 + 1 / 2 = 4.

For ANH you get 2 + 2 / 2 = 2.

GWTW isn't even close.

Thus, ANH wins overall because it ranks the strongest of all films when looking at both lists.

Of course, I respectfully agree that GWTW is the most attended film in movie history and deserves its place at #1, but I know there are those Titanic fans who like to grasp at straws and say the gross matters only, nothing else, which is a little weak IMO, at least as a measure of how popular a movie truly was. Today, $100 million doesn't mean anything for a movie. In 1960, uhh, $100 million was frickin' amazing.

I don't think GWTW is going to be #1 forever here... I think ANH is going to catch it in the next two decades.

It is not that far off here. ANH made $140 million in the last re-release, it might need only one or two more to get to the ticket total of GWTW. If it does, it will probably stay as #1 either nearly forever or until GWTW is released again or perhaps some other film near the top comes out again. Although the last GWTW release was pitiful. That film has no more steam left now...

ANH, if it made #1, could probably stay there the rest of my life at least and probably another century after that, haha. And, you never know, Star Wars might become so much of a religious experience that the films will be in re-release like every five years and nothing will ever catch ANH, haha.

If you look at Titanic's total on that list, you'll see why I think Episode II and III have at least some chance of topping Titanic, even if remote.

$717 million...

Episode II only needs $601 million in today's dollars to beat Titanic and as you can see from inflation with a little more help in ticket prices being bumped again before summer, TPM would be close to $500 million. Episode II would just need perhaps a strong critical push (hehe, doubtful IMO) and vastly positive audience reaction and maybe $550M at least is not out of reach... and if that is not out of reach, on the next release, Titanic is history. Oh wait, Titanic already is history. Sorry that was a lame pun. ;)

[Darth23]

The Movie Times has a different order for thwie list:

http://www.the-movie-times.com/thrsdir/Top10everad.html

Interestingly, this one has TPM, ESB ad ROTJ all together and only $20 something million apart.

This one has a link to a Consumer Price Index chart at the bottom of the page - I guess so someome could do the calculatons on their own.

[Jedieb]

Here's a site I found awhile back:

http://www.bestdigest.com/movies/bo/alltime/inflationadjusted.htm

They've got some big differences between them, especially in regards to Snow White. They've got similiar gross numbers, but the adjusted ones are way out of whack. Nothing is ever going to have the kind of box office impact that GWTW had because the entertainment landscape has completely changed. Think about it, for a good portion of its audience, GWTW may have been the ONLY moving pictures they saw that year. Different time, different era.

[CMJ]

I think the differences are some of the lists count the re-issues grosses and calculate those ticket sales at the original's number.

For example...SW: ANH made like 140M on it's last release. So I think what they did for GWTW was to calculate that 140M(or whatever it's gross was for those re-issues) but used the original 1939 price of a ticket. Thats why you see big differences....

[Darth23]

That doesn't explain the differences in the standings of the Star Wars sequels, though.

[BUFFJEDI]

Is there a list of the top ten adjusted for inflation list on first run?

[Jedieb]

The only way to have an accurate adjusted list is to tackle each film individually. You have to adjust its gross by each release. For example, if you gross $30M in 1950, and then $10M in 1980, you have to adjust each year individually and then add the total. If you simply adjust $40M for 2002 then you're going to be off.

Year Gross Total Adjusted for Inflation
1950 $30 $30M $30M
1980 $10 $40M ($30M=$102,570,00) + $10M= 112,570,000
2001 $0 $40M $112,570,000=$240,850,000

But if you just adjust $40M from the date of the original release, 1950, you get a different number.
1950 2001
$40M = $294,110,000

One of these sites has to be using the data incorrectly. You just can't take the amount of money a film has made and plug it into a CPI calculator. You have to add the numbers by their individual release dates or you'll end up giving a movie more credit than it deserves. The more releases a movie has than the more likely its total will get incorrectly adjusted.

[JonathanLB]

"Nothing is ever going to have the kind of box office impact that GWTW had because the entertainment landscape has completely changed."

No question, totally agree. There is just such a vast difference between what there is to do now and what there was to do then. No Internet, no computers, no video games, very few movies, TV wasn't in most homes right? Radio was all, and board games, haha. I mean literally, movies were the biggest deal around. If you weren't seeing a movie you were maybe reading a book or something. But everyone, EVERYONE went to movies and they were a huge deal. Attendance was higher then than it is now despite the population increases.

One thing is for certain here, there is only ONE CORRECT adjusted number for every movie. There may be 10 different sites with different numbers, but either all 10 are wrong or 9 of them are wrong. This is not even just a little bit subjective. It's not subjective at all. It's completely objective and the exact adjusted grosses can be calculated with a little work.

I suppose there is a little bit of confusiong with some of these older films. Like this whole Snow White thing, sorry to be blunt, is horsesh*t. That movie never came anywhere close to these numbers they have, LOL, it's really absurd. Nor is Jaws supposed to be above Titanic. I have no idea where they pulled that out of, actually. But my guess is it came from the back side and towards the anal area, haha.

The easiest way to do these lists so that you don't have to completely redo them every year is rather obvious, so I hope a few of these sites have figured it out. This isn't rocket science. You need to compute how many tickets each movie has sold. When you get finished doing that, you can simply multiply that by the current average ticket price. So with ANH, once you know it has sold 169.9 million tickets, that number never has to be adjusted again until it is re-released again. You just take that times $5.60 and get $951.44. That number is more like the others I have seen. GWTW should be about $125 million ahead (maybe $150), though, so to me it does look like they got at least that part right, but they counted high on both GWTW and ANH.

Titanic is getting shafted, interestingly enough, because it should be $728 million I believe. Not $717M.

I really don't see why they are having trouble with this for the newest movies, it's really very easy.

TPM's real adjusted gross is actually $475 million, so they're wrong again on that one.

Here is the math for anyone interested.

According to ER, which I happen to disagree with, the average ticket price for TPM was $5.08 (I believe they should have used a number between 1999's starting average, $4.75, and Jan. 2000's average, $5.08). So, even though I disagree with their number and am guessing it's off by as much as 25 cents, let's just use it because if every movie is treated the same way, it works out well enough right?

$431.1 million / $5.08 = 84.86 million tickets sold.

84.86 million * $5.60, the new average ticket price =$475 million.

Again, I have no idea how they could screw up such simple math. If anything, they should have TPM for an adjusted gross of about $500 million, not lower than $475M...

Even if they used TPM's numbers without the charity release, $427.7 million, they're still wrong (low by about $5 million).

Why can't the U.S., in all of its technological wonder, track both ticket sales and gross figures?! UGG!

[Jedieb]

I believe the problem lies in that ticket sales are never counted. The gross is calculated and then you get the number of tickets after you get the average ticket price for the year and then do the math. So again, you have a problem. You now have to go back to each individual release and get the grosses for that year and THEN get the number of tickets sold. But since no one's ever really interested in the number of tickets sold you don't know how many tickets Snow White or GWTW sold in a certain year. That one site that has Snow White listed at #2 does have a number of admissions. Maybe they've done the math and then converted grosses to admissions somewhere along the line. The only way to be sure is to do the research and get a definitive gross for each of Snow White's releases. Then you can find the average ticket price for those years and then you can add up the number of admission. Once you have that it should be simple to just keep adding on addmissions after each release. But someone has to do the research first. It's hard to know which one of these sites has done their homework correctly.

I just thought of a problem with going by admissions. You'd be assuming that ticket prices are mirroring the rate of inflation. I don't see how they could match penny for penny. Some years tickets will increase at a rate that's greater than the CPI's, some years prices will rise at a lower rate. So the number of admissions is going to throw things somewhere. Also, if you go by the number of admissions, then eventually a larger U.S. population base will allow the average blockbuster to outsell GWTW and ANH. International numbers will increase greatly in time as well. Imagine China and India in 50 years? Stable economies there would rewrite admission and $ records on a yearly basis and push all of our movies off the charts.