Thanks for the story about all time boxoffice champs. As a former theatre
manager, I've always said that you don't rank movies from different eras by
their boxoffice gross, you rank them by the number of paid admissions.Â
Inflation may inflate the gross, but an admission is still an admission - and
that levels the playing field. The $2.00 admission price of 1968 can't
compete with the $10 admission price of 2009. Considering today's ticket
prices, what current movie wouldn't out-gross a picture from 40 years ago? They
could do it with just 20% to 25% of the admissions of the earlier
movies.
One could argue that older movies like
Gone With The Wind had
several re-issues to bolster their all time gross and that's true. But by the
same token, older movies did not have alternative markets like home video or pay
per view for the first several decades of their existence. - Bob Collins
 Retro responds: You're right, Bob...adjusting for inflation greatly alters our perception of what films are the most popular. As you point out, perhaps the best way to judge is to compare the number of tickets sold. For example, while Casino Royale is the highest grossing James Bond film with well over $500 million worldwide gross, in fact the 1965 release Thunderball is still by far the king of the series in terms of the numbers of tickets sold. Comparable statistics can be run on any classic film and the results would certainly surprise today's movie-goers. - Lee Pfeiffer