Avatar: Gone with the Wind
by zunguzungu
Forgetting the past, these folks get all jazzed about how:
“In a mere 41 days, Avatar overtook Titanic to become the highest-grossing movie ever at the worldwide box office at $1.859 billion ($555 million domestic plus $1.304 billion foreign), compared to Titanic’s $1.843 billion.”
But, of course, that’s because ticket prices have gone through the roof. If you compare number of tickets sold, by contrast, Avatar comes in at a whopping #26 on the all time list:
1 “Gone With the Wind” (1939) 202,044,600
2 “Star Wars” (1977) 178,119,600
3 “The Sound of Music” (1965) 142,415,400
26 “Avatar” (2009) 76,421,000
Not that even this comparison is even remotely meaningful; census figures for the US in 1940 give a total figure of 150 million, whereas the census clock for a moment ago gives our total at 308,572,681 (not to mention how different things like foreign distribution are), so if we were to try, the comparison of percentage of total population that have seen the movie would put Avatar at somewhere closer to 1/5th of Gone With the Wind. Still it’s a nice way to put into perspective the moral imperative of NEWEST BEST that rules these kinds of media narratives. I still predict Avatar will actually be one of the least long lasting of Cameron’s movies.
zunguzungu 
Ooh, hey! I thought that Hollywood had suppressed numbers of ticket sales for this very reason — it lets them constantly tout the “record-breaking” latest movie and glosses over the whole inflation and rising cost of the tickets.
So how did that other site get its numbers?
It looks like they calculate back from the gross ticket sales; if you know what the average ticket price is, you can figure out roughly how many were sold. The whole list is here by the way.
Of course, the point isn’t that the numbers are reliable, just that they reliably show us a kind of unreliability in the other numbers. Quantifying how unquantifyable something is; that’s where the action is. So pomo!
There are several problems with this counter-argument. First, you can’t use the “average ticket price” as a blanket formula for determining how many tickets were sold for each particular movie. Many of the film on the list – “Gone With the Wind”, “The Sound of Music”, “The Ten Commandments”, “Ben Hur” – were considered highbrow “prestige” entertainment, and as such, studios imposed higher ticket prices on them. (Fortunately, this practice doesn’t happen anymore. Instead, movie theaters take it upon themselves to raise ticket prices for all movies before the release of a potential summer blockbuster. I’ll leave it to you to decide which is better.)
Second, the total box office numbers include all the re-releases the films have received over the years. This benefits movies like “Star Wars”, of which only two-thirds of its total gross came from the original release. If we want an even playing field, then we should wait to see how much “Avatar” has made with each subsequent re-release in the theaters before making a comparison.
So, if we’re looking for accuracy or even a fair approximation, adjusting for inflation isn’t going to help us here. This is not to say that “Avatar” is the #1 movie in terms of attendance. But all things considered, it’s probably much higher on the list than #26.
“Subsequent release”, not “subsequent re-release”! Gah! The ability to edit out mistakes after submitting would be a godsend.
Those are good points, but it does seem like they’re a bit more sophisticated than I made them out to be (you can read the explanation here). They seem to have actual figures for GwtW, for example, and the acknowledge the re-release factor: