Major Barriers Broken at the Box Office

Madmick

Madmick

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Just a random idea for a thread since I was discussing revenues recently. It's crazy how you see so many movies raking in over $500m (globally) these days.

Wiki has a page on this, but the below bullet list I've compiled only counts the original run, not re-releases, as otherwise Gone with the Wind has grossed over $200m, and Star Wars would be the highest grossing film in history, domestically. This counts only the original runs, and doesn't adjust for inflation, though I've shown you the value of a $1 today when the movie came out, and the US population at the time, so you can get an idea for how significant the box office take was relative to today:
en.wikipedia.org

List of highest-grossing films - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Domestic Box Office


*Edit* Correction: E.T. did not break $500m in its original theater run, or even domestically after reruns. Updated for accuracy.
 
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Inflation is fascinating.

What kind of films could breakout, financially, in today's climate, with the emerging media alternatives and partisan politics. Science fiction, science fantasy, and historical epics were successful in the past.

What could capture the attention of those with diminishing spans?

Clearly, the potential for a unicorn project would increase with a Spielberg or Cameron writer/director/producer type at the helm.
 
Surprised to see nothing hit 1 billion domestic yet, thought for sure some of the bigger MCUs or Avatar did that


Or maybe Shawshank Redemption
 
www.imdb.com

Highest Grossing Blockbusters of All Time Adjusted for Inflation

(Including Re-Releases) (Some adjusted values could be higher or lower because the calculation for old movies is very difficult)
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com

(1) Gone With the Wind (1939) - $4.45
(2) Avatar (2009) - $4.05
(3) Titanic (1997) - $3.77
(4) Star Wars (1977) - $3.65
(5) Avengers: Endgame (2019) - $3.35

(6) The Sound of Music (1965) - $3.05
(7) ET (1982) - $2.82
(8) The Ten Commandments (1956) - $2.82
(9) Doctor Zhivago (1965) - $2.68
(10) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - $2.64

All 50 films in this list are over a billion.
 
650lb Sumo said:
www.imdb.com

Highest Grossing Blockbusters of All Time Adjusted for Inflation

(Including Re-Releases) (Some adjusted values could be higher or lower because the calculation for old movies is very difficult)
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com

(1) Gone With the Wind (1939) - $4.45
(2) Avatar (2009) - $4.05
(3) Titanic (1997) - $3.77
(4) Star Wars (1977) - $3.65
(5) Avengers: Endgame (2019) - $3.35

(6) The Sound of Music (1965) - $3.05
(7) ET (1982) - $2.82
(8) The Ten Commandments (1956) - $2.82
(9) Doctor Zhivago (1965) - $2.68
(10) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - $2.64

All 50 films in this list are over a billion.
Click to expand...
Okay. What's the point? That's not what the OP was about. I spelled this out.

Again, the OP only considered:
  1. Domestic (USA) box office
  2. Unadjusted income (i.e. not adjusted for inflation)
  3. Original runs only (no additional theatrical release income considered)
 
Madmick said:
Just a random idea for a thread since I was discussing revenues recently. It's crazy how you see so many movies raking in over $500m (globally) these days.
Click to expand...
-Some of those movies are bad, not bad when compared to Tombstone or Dance with wolves. But realy boring movies. The ticket prices realy skyrocket here, so thats contribute to several movies breaking this barrier. You obviously remember when movies like Batman Forever and Toy Story were box office darlings, and none of them crossed 400 m. And GOD BF is a far better movie than the trash Marvels has been puting out latelly, outside Spider-Man of course.
 
Madmick said:
Okay. What's the point? That's not what the OP was about. I spelled this out.

Again, the OP only considered:
  1. Domestic (USA) box office
  2. Unadjusted income (i.e. not adjusted for inflation)
  3. Original runs only (no additional theatrical release income considered)
Click to expand...
tilting_at_windmills.jpg
 
One thing I'd like to point out. I know Gone with the Wind tops most inflation-adjusted charts. But that's because it has had six theatrical runs counted on Box Office mojo. There's a post on Reddit that counts it to be nine in total: 1939, 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1989, and 1998. Furthermore, its original theatrical run went all the way from 1939 until 1943 because of the nature of the film industry at the time.

Meanwhile, Birth of a Nation generated as much as $18m in profit back in 1915 alone, and over $20m in gross income according to published books cited in the footnotes of the Wiki link I shared in the OP. Now, at the time, theater ticket prices averaged just $0.07, which even adjusted for inflation only comes out to ~$2.25 per ticket, but that's because most movies at the time were short films, not feature length. Birth of a Nation changed all that by demonstrating there was an appetite for feature length films. However, it was helped towards this goal by usually charging anywhere from $0.25-$2.00 per seat [2], depending on where in the theater you were seated, which is an enormous luxury:
Sam Clem at Straight Dope Boards said:
In reading newspapers from the 1915 period, I discovered that the $2 ticket price was the top price for a ticket in some of the premier theaters which showed it first. For instance, the Colonial Theater in Chicago started showing it in July of that year. The theater could seat 1400 people. The ticket prices were $1 and $2 for the Orchestra, 75cents/$1/$1.50 for the first balcony, 50 cents for the 2nd balcony and 25 cents for the Gallery. This was for evening performances and Sat. matinee. They had one show per night at 8:15. “Other” matinees were about half those prices.

I found an ad for the December, 1915 showing in Modesto(CA).
25 cents(500 seats], 50 cents(400 seats) and 75 cents(200 seats). <br>
The Chicago theater was taking orders for tickets four months in advance. At least, that what their ads said.

So, the $2 ticket price was paid by certainly less than 5% of all the tickets sold. I doubt that you could use a higher average figure than 75 cents.
Click to expand...
Assuming a $0.75 average price, and this poster fairly argues that is probably a ceiling figure based on that theater's seating, at least, this would be $24 adjusted for inflation.

So that's a high average ticket price, but even so, if an estimate of a 75-cent average is accurate, that would mean there was somewhere around 27m tickets sold in the original run alone. Could be more, could be less, but that's our operating estimate. With a population of just 100m at the time, that's simply massive. Obviously some people watch movies multiple times, perhaps no film was as famous for this as Titanic, but we're talking about a number of tickets equaling more than a quarter of the country's population.

The average ticket price today is $11.31, and the population is estimated at 347.5m people. Assuming 27% of our population bought tickets to a movie at that average price, the movie would gross $1.06 billion dollars in an initial domestic run. That would exceed even Endgame's $1.03bn inflation-adjusted take.

Nevertheless, Gone with the Wind sold some 60m tickets in that first 4-year run. The country's population was only 131m at the time, so perhaps it still reigns as the most impressive box office performance in American history.
 
650lb Sumo said:
tilting_at_windmills.jpg
Click to expand...
Nobody's tilting at windmills. You invoked the $1bn figure when I mentioned $500m in my first sentence discussing the spate of recent films raking that in globally. The only reference to $1bn was to point out none of our original domestic runs has ever hit that figure. If your only goal was to enrich the thread by highlighting all those films, cool, but I don't understand why when I was never discussing inflation-adjusted totals. I was confused why you deem that figure significant in the context of the OP.
jeff7b9 said:
How about the negative $300 million barrier ?

Does that count?


View attachment 1110055
Click to expand...
I actually wouldn't mind if other posters picked up the ball and rolled with it.

Build a list for barriers breached by worldwide gross, or grosses within their own country. Maybe a list for women directors. Stuff like that. And yeah, a timeline for box office bombs would be great.
 
650lb Sumo said:
www.imdb.com

Highest Grossing Blockbusters of All Time Adjusted for Inflation

(Including Re-Releases) (Some adjusted values could be higher or lower because the calculation for old movies is very difficult)
www.imdb.com www.imdb.com

(1) Gone With the Wind (1939) - $4.45
(2) Avatar (2009) - $4.05
(3) Titanic (1997) - $3.77
(4) Star Wars (1977) - $3.65
(5) Avengers: Endgame (2019) - $3.35

(6) The Sound of Music (1965) - $3.05
(7) ET (1982) - $2.82
(8) The Ten Commandments (1956) - $2.82
(9) Doctor Zhivago (1965) - $2.68
(10) Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) - $2.64

All 50 films in this list are over a billion.
Click to expand...

thanks. this makes way more sense
 
eddymotto said:
thanks. this makes way more sense
Click to expand...
Weird that you would have been confused. There is already a list of inflation-adjusted rankings in the Wiki linked in the OP, and one that even more accurately adjusts for ticket inflation since ticket prices haven't necessarily mirrored CPI or general inflation.
 
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