Other Crap

Box Office Mojo - All Time Box Office - Adjusted into 2006 Dollars

• I don't know if anything will ever unseat Gone With the Wind's records. You see, Box Office Mojo's chart adjusts for ticket prices, but does not adjust for the population of the United States, which was about 130 million in 1939. Gone With the Wind has sold 200 million paid tickets -fifteen tickets per ten people, or about one and a half tickets for every man, woman and baby in the country when it was released! In order to produce an equivalent result, a film today would have to sell more than 450 million tickets, or a box office gross of about $3 billion dollars.
• The second place finisher, Star Wars, has sold an impressive 178 million tickets, but was released in a year when the US population had climbed to 220 million, thus has sold "only" about eight tickets for every ten people in the 1977 population.
• There is another way to look at it that makes Star Wars seem to be the champion. GWTW has sold 202 million tickets, but there were 2.3 BILLION tickets sold in 1939, in the heyday of cinema, pre-television. Star Wars has sold 178 million tickets, but was released in a year when only 1.1 billion were sold. In other words, GWTW's record is not just a factor of the individual film's popularity, but of the industry in general. Its ticket sales account for 9% of 1939's sales, while Star Wars accounts for 16% of 1977's. (NOTE: Neither stat is literally a correct market share, since not all of Star Wars' tickets were sold in 1977, nor GWTW's in 1939. Nonetheless, they are useful guides to the comparative popularity of the two films.)
• The truly amazing thing about 1939's ticket sales is that they occurred in the Great Depression. By 1946, US ticket sales had soared to 4.8 BILLION units, about 34 for every person then living in the country. In comparison, the number of tickets sold in a current year is around a third of that number, despite the fact that the population has more than doubled. Today's Americans buy about five movie tickets per capita, same as they did in 1964.
• The massive decline in ticket sales occurred from 1946 to 1964, when television gradually lured away more and more of cinema's business and, because of the oppressive Hays Code, cinema was powerless to respond with more sensational sex and violence.