I am constantly hearing references to the “highest” or “second-highest” grossing movies of all time. But it seems to me that the numbers never change, yet I can rememer hearing these media stories for over ten years (when i became old enough to give a hooey). Are the receipts for older films (like Gone with the Wind) ever updated to reflect current-value dollars?
Or is the change over the 10-year span I’ve been listening just not enough to be easily noticible?
Movie studio publicists love the big numbers, so grosses are always given as is, in inflated current dollars, just because they sound so good. Gone with the Wind almost certainly made more in constant dollars than any other movie but what good does that do anybody today?
Most of the movie sites on the Internet have an inflation indicator somewhere. And boxofficemojo.com has this page with the movies ranked adjusted for inflation. Notice that Shrek 2 is the highest movie on that list made in this millennium, way down at #30.
But these are estimates made with guesses about how many tickets were sold for how much at particular times, against their own multipliers. Nobody official does this so there can always be arguments over what the standings are.
That’s a very interesting list. Scanning down, my first ‘WTF moments’ were The Graduate and Phantom Menace. And, reassuringly, a scan down the date column suggests that no one decade has a dominance over the others.
Though it does seem odd, to me at least, that the only pre-Snow White entry should be The Four Hoursemen of the Apocalypse from 1921. A damn good film and a great success in its time, but the only pre-1937 entry?
And, yes sam, the SDMB has been round this block before.