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The Top Grossing Films of All Time -- Adjusted for Inflation

By Dustin Rowles | Posted Under Trade News | Comments (24)

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Bloomberg, a financial magazine of some sort, has gone and played with all time box-office rankings, using some sort of formula algorithm doohickey thingamabob, and in doing so, they’ve come up with the 25 top grossing films of all time, adjusted for inflation. In other words, the movies with the most ticket sales.

If you’re interested in these sort of things, as I am, it might be fascinating to know that, Titanic, the largest grosser in terms of pure dollars, is actually only sixth in inflation adjusted dollars, behind The Ten Commandments. What’s more interesting to me, however, is that the second biggest grosser of all time, The Dark Knight, doesn’t even make the top 25. That means, of course, that more people actually saw The Exorcist and Forrest Gump in movie theaters than The Dark Knight. In inflation adjusted dollars, Star Wars also moves from number three to number two all time, behind Gone with the Wind, the biggest ticket seller of all time. They sure did like their 4-hour racist movies back in the day.

The good news, psychologically speaking, is that films like Shrek 2, all of the Lord of the Rings movies, and Passion of the Christ also fall out of the top 25 when adjusted for inflation.

Anyway, take a gander: Here are the top 25 movies adjusted for inflation:

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And here are the top 25 movies in terms of dollars:

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Comments

Three cheers for The Sting!

Posted by: Lucie at July 8, 2009 10:17 AM

Math is cool.

Posted by: Anna von Beaverplatz at July 8, 2009 10:19 AM

The Graduate is number 18? I have to say I never would have guessed that. I'm most pleased.

Posted by: sansho1 at July 8, 2009 10:26 AM

It would be interesting to see the most profitable movies of all time, both in terms of pure dollars (adjusted for inflation) and as a percentage of the cost of the movie. That might show some interesting trends.

Anyway, it explains a lot that Star Wars alone took in the modern equivalent of a billion dollars. Of course, back when it first came out I totally expected that movie would make a gadjillion dollars so it's still somewhat short.

Posted by: Neodiogenes at July 8, 2009 10:44 AM

I've always thought ranking box office champs without adjusting for inflation was bullshit. 50 years ago tickets were 50 cents and the entire country averaged something like one trip to the movies a week.* That's $26 a year per person on movie tickets. So today you can easily spend that much on three trips to the theater. And out of that you'll always end up with "Transformers II" kicking "GWTW"'s ass and that just ain't right.

*-possibly an exaggeration, but not much.

Posted by: , (the commenter formerly known as bucdaddy) at July 8, 2009 10:44 AM

Speaking of four hour long racist movies, where's Birth of a Nation? Everyone apparently went to see that when it first came out, which I think is why the civil rights movement didn't get underway for another half century.

Posted by: Macafee at July 8, 2009 10:58 AM

I wish there was a way to show how many unique visits a movie had, purely because of the number of weepy twelve-year-old girls who saw Titanic twenty times or more.

Posted by: Caroline at July 8, 2009 11:10 AM

The thing that I can never get past when looking at these lists, is that back when movie tickets weren't 10 fricking dollars people would have been much more likely to see a below average movie just to have something to do. For a movie to have high ticket sales now is a real accomplishment.

Posted by: Michelle at July 8, 2009 11:22 AM

Tell me again how Jaws created the movie blockbuster. Oh, right time travel. See, all those earlier top grossing movies were produced by Marty McFly in his other trip to the past, after he saw the movie with the fish.

Posted by: BierceAmbrose at July 8, 2009 11:26 AM

true story about Zhivago. the once and only time i ever saw it, on DVD, a number of years ago. it was on some kind of double-sided disc that wasn't exactly clear about which side was A and which was B (1/2 on one side and the other 1/2 the other, you catch me...). so we put it in and started watching. I thought it was a little odd. i felt really lost the whole time. it ended the credits rolled. we couldn't believe that we had watched the 2nd HALF! we said forget it and turned it off. terrible movie.

Posted by: gunnertec at July 8, 2009 11:32 AM

Man, that's OLD, they didn't do shit with algorythus, they just copied from BOM, you can see the top 100 there: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm

Posted by: zito at July 8, 2009 11:33 AM

I think one must also consider that almost all of the adjusted top 25 came out before a time when you could wait six months, get a movie on DVD or Blu-Ray and watch it on your 50-inch HDTV with your home theater surround system. Hell, most of those movies were out before there was any way to see a feature film at home. Going to the theater was--literally--the only way to see a movie!

Posted by: Sean at July 8, 2009 11:35 AM

Even these figures are not telling the whole story.

Before the advent of home video, the only way to see a movie was to go to the movies. You could wait until a movie made it onto network TV (only three channels in those days, kids, remember?) and watch a cut-up version, but GWTW, just as an example, did not air on television until 1977. Disney also kept most of its cinematic treasures off the airwaves.

Films like GWTW and Snow White used to be re-released into theaters every few years. As a child, I saw most of the Disney catalog this way--re-releases, at the local moviehouse. (I'm old. Shut up.)

Gone With the Wind is massively great and deserves its top spot; but the truth is, that movie has had since 1939 to rack up all that box-office dough. Add into the equation the fact that any movie released after the late 70s has a huge box-office disadvantage (because of home video/DVD), and you begin to see how futile this whole exercise is.

If they were calculating how much money these films brought in (box office, network rights, home video sales and now downloads), adjusted for inflation, you'd have a much more realistic picture of which films are the most popular of all time.

Posted by: Jerce at July 8, 2009 11:45 AM

Gee, if they could only do this with Obama's Health Care cluster fuck, the country could be savable.

Posted by: richmac at July 8, 2009 12:14 PM

BierceAmbrose,
I believe it is usually stated that Jaws created the summer blockbuster, which is more than the just a high grossing movie. It's advertising on a mass scale, wide release, tie-in merchandise, spin-offs, sequels, etc. It was a new mentality for studios. Along with a few key colossal failures, those two movies effectively ended the New Hollywood era, which is a shame depending on who you ask. Anyway, I'm off to see Spiderman 8!

But, mostly, I'm not comfortable with you sullying the good name of Back to the Future by incorporating it into a put-down(sort of). I don't think that would fly with Marty, ya dig?

Posted by: pissant at July 8, 2009 12:34 PM

Bwah. Gone With the Wind owns all their asses.

And I'm more offended that Episode I is up there than about Titanic or Forrest Gump. And guilty, because I watched that fucker in theaters 3 times.

I want to go back in time and bitchslap my 16 year-old-self. Ewan McGregor was not worth it.

Posted by: figgy at July 8, 2009 12:57 PM

I can't believe more people haven't seen Hot Rod.

Posted by: Angus at July 8, 2009 1:07 PM

What Michelle and Jerce said.

While I find the adjusted-for-inflation figures to be more relevant measures of popularity and a better estimate of a true movie box office "ranking," the films that are released today face a much more crowded, fragmented, instant-gratification marketplace. Thus, it's apples and oranges, and the movies sitting atop both lists can claim an "achievement," if you give a damn how much money a movie makes (which I usually don't).

Posted by: DarthCorleone at July 8, 2009 1:09 PM

You know what I do love about this?

How producers are always bitching about how movies starring women don't make money--the highest grossing film of ALL TIME revolves entirely around a female character.

The Sounds of Music, Mary Poppins, even Titanic and even Snow White are led by female characters.

I like that.

Posted by: figgy at July 8, 2009 1:16 PM

Correction: I usually don't care about box office as some sort of correlative measure of a film's quality. However, I do care about how much money movies make because the dollar dictates the content that the studios are willing to produce.

Posted by: DarthCorleone at July 8, 2009 1:16 PM

These comparisons are fun and I dig them but comparing different eras of anything is problematic at best. Try comparing different eras of baseball for instance. Anyway, though the advent of home entertainment no doubt distorts these figures let's not forget that the number of films released by major studios is down quite a bit from the past (at least a partial consequence of the summer blockbuster mentality). And let's also not forget that the US population has more than doubled since 1939!

Posted by: ed newman at July 8, 2009 3:41 PM

Eeew. I never realized that - without adjusting for inflation - all three of the Star Wars prequels were in the top 25 of all time; and 2 of them were in the top 10! EEEEEK!

Posted by: Edith at July 8, 2009 4:11 PM

Was that a cheap shot at LOTR, again? Yeah, it was.

Posted by: Lauren at July 8, 2009 6:49 PM

Re: ed newman

It's quite easy to do either: compare different eras, that is.

It's not that hard to figure out the context for a movie released in 1939 (and many, many times after) compared to a movie released in 1997 (and never since). Just because those contexts are different doesn't make the comparison any less valid.

Also, where do you get that the number of films released by major studios is down? According to BOM, the number of films released has increased fairly steadily since 1995. This after 10 years of relative stability (roughly 500 films per year since 1983).

Maybe you're looking at different information than I.

Posted by: Ingres at July 9, 2009 5:53 AM