All Time Box Office Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation

All Time Box Office Adjusted for Ticket Price Inflation

All film receipts have been converted to 2012 dollars.

Including only films released in the past 25 years, Titanic and Avatar are still 1-2, except that Titanic holds the top spot.

The all-time champ is (of course) Gone With the Wind, which grossed $1.6 billion in 2012 dollars.

Odd facts:

(1) The Avengers still ranks below several films from the 90s, including Forrest Gump, Jurassic Park, The Lion King and The Phantom Menace. Ticket prices have risen sharply, even since 1999, when the average ticket price was a "mere" five bucks.

(2) Cleopatra was approximately as big a hit as The Avengers. Cleopatra took in $532 million in today's dollars! (On the other hand, its production costs were about $400 million in today's dollars.) I remember well the phenomenon that was Cleopatra. You have to realize that it ran 3 hours plus an intermission, so it could only be shown twice per night at maximum, most likely just once about 7:00, and that there were far fewer screens available in 1963 (about a third as many as today). People sometimes had to wait weeks to get tickets for Cleopatra, as my mom did, even though it is often remembered today as a monumental bomb. In many ways it was a bomb, but it pulled in audiences.