Adjusting for inflation might seem like a wonky buzz-kill to James Cameron’s opus, but it’s really important. The average ticket price in
\n1939, when Gone with the Wind<\/i> hit theaters, was 23 cents. My Avatar ticket cost $10.50. That’s 45-times more expensive! As Slate’s Zachary Pinkus-Roth noted<\/a>, this would be comparing somebody’s 100-yard sprint time to a 2.22-yard jump.<\/p>\n
Here’s the full list of the biggest domestic grosses adjusted for inflation from Box Office Mojo<\/a> (the list does not include Avatar<\/i>, which has made $560 million):<\/p>\n It turns out that there are a couple problems with counting all tickets sales and multiplying them all by the inflation index. First, by treating all ticket sales as equal, we overestimate the grosses of movies where a big proportion of the sales were to children, whose tickets cost less. That’s one reason why movies like 101 Dalmatians<\/i>, Fantasia<\/i> and The Lion King<\/i> rank so high. Another problem with the list is that the cost of a movie ticket has actually grown faster than the consumer price index, according to Pinkus-Roth. That means that a ticket to Gone in 60 Seconds<\/i> (2000) cost more in relation to other items than a ticket to Gone with the Wind<\/i> (1939). And those are just two of the most serious issues.<\/p>\n So this is an imperfect list, but the point it makes is instructive. It’s true that Avatar<\/i> has made more dollars than any movie ever, but it’s not entirely accurate to call it the biggest movie of all time.<\/p>\n *Thanks to Charles Davi for making me emphasize that this list is domestic box office. So Avatar<\/i>‘s worldwide gross of $1.85 beats Gone with the Wind<\/i>‘s domestic gross record. Some time this week, Avatar will surpass Titanic to become the best-selling movie in the history of the world. Kind of. The film’s worldwide gross is nearing $1.85 billion, which is more than any movie ever released. But adjusted for inflation, Avatar is not the best selling movie of all time. In fact, *going by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1534,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-226990","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226990","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1534"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=226990"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/226990\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=226990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=226990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=226990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"boxofficereal.png\"](\"http:\/\/business.theatlantic.com\/boxofficereal.png\")
<\/span>So inflation-adjusting puts Avatar<\/i> ahead of Thunderball<\/i> and just behind, um, Grease<\/i>. Grease<\/i>! Wait, can that be right? <\/p>\n
\n
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n 
<\/a>
\n
\n<\/a>
\n<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/a.rfihub.com\/eus.gif?eui=2225\"\/)