There's no perfect method, but adjusting for inflation skews things significantly. Movie ticket prices haven't mirrored inflation, and usually lag behind it. Often prices remain static for years, and when they do change, they don't change in line with the price of milk, cars, soybeans, and so forth. More importantly, doing so doesn't factor in the advantages older films had. Home recording, video rental, piracy, the internet, DVDs, cable TV, streaming services, and a general decline in people leaving their couch all make it harder for a modern film to compete with an older film. And then there are advantages a specific film may have. In the case of Avatar, it was something nearly everyone saw in 3-D, which made for a massive boost in revenue, and also the peak of the modern 3-D film, which meant many viewers went simply because it was in 3-D, not caring what the film was. Furthermore, films stayed in theaters far longer in years past. Avatar played for 32 weeks, I believe, compared to 12 weeks for Endgame, which is about to be pulled from theaters and released on home video. Lastly, if you go back before the '80s or so, there was no real tracking system in place. Theater owners were basically asked "how many tickets were sold?" and that was it. If someone said "oh man like 1000 people showed up," then 1000 was recorded, even if it were only 100. There are likely many other factors, but the bottom line is that simply plugging dollars into an equation to adjust for inflation gives an almost useless result.
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NVF (851)
5 years ago
...bottom line is that simply plugging dollars into an equation to adjust for inflation gives an almost useless result.
not from the numbers used to rank grosses which was my point
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FilmBuff (7261)
5 years ago
Gross box office is the best way I know to compare films from the late '90s onward. There really is no viable metric for comparing films from about 1996 forward to those of the past, as far too many changes have made it into an apples to oranges comparison. And then, comparing any films before the early '80s to anything after that is basically impossible; apples to shovels, that one.
Looking at the "adjusted for ticket price inflation" chart tells you absolutely nothing about how popular or successful a film was in comparison to another.
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NVF (851)
5 years ago
gross can be a misleading measure due to inflation and ticket value/pricing as i already said
the average ticket price in 1969 was $1.42 which adjusted for inflation would cost $10.14 in 2019 dollars
in 1997 it was $4.59; last year $9.11
in '91 $4.21; '94 $4.08, a rare case where the price dropped
https://www.natoonline.org/data/ticket-price/
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