Greta Gerwig’s movie will race pass the $200 million mark at the domestic box office Tuesday, while Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ will clear $100 million.
Greta Gerwig’s movie will race pass the $200 million mark at the domestic box office Tuesday, while Christopher Nolan’s ‘Oppenheimer’ will clear $100 million.
So this apparently broke a record for sales, but isn’t that kind of pointless when inflation and movie ticket prices are higher than ever? Should ticket quantities matter more when determining a movies popularity?
Marketing bullshit.
Wait, you mean movies overall aren’t just more popular than they’ve ever been in the history of entertainment? You mean studios are trying to bring more people in by suggesting they’re missing out on this incredibly popular time for cinema?
…checks out.
Yeah, but box office records are often not adjusted for inflation. People frequently compare movies from a several decades ago, which even at 2% inflation, ads up over the years.
IMHO, it’s not worth getting caught up in the detail. The point is that Barbie is making a fuck load of money. It’s over $200m US domestic since it opened on Friday, and the movie cost $145m to make. No one’s going to lose money on Barbie. They going to make a grip. Especially after you count international tickets and all the damn toys and merch.
Even that is misleading if the population is growing. Really it should be ticket sales per capita if we truly want to figure out the most popular movie of all time.
By these rules, Gone with the Wind likely wins.
But it’s still not a good comparison because of other factors. First off, movie theaters didn’t used to compete with television, cable, video games, DVDs, streaming, or social media for your free time. The industry was also a lot smaller, meaning there were fewer high profile movies dividing up that whole pie. The lack of practical home video also meant popular films like Gone with the Wind would get frequently re-issued and continue racking up ticket sales.
It is essentially impossible to accurately compare the popularity of any two movies separated by more than a decade or two.
Gone with the wind has such a huge lead when adjusting for inflation it’s insane, 390 million dollars when movie tickets were 25 cents. That’s over 1.5 billion tickets. It’s also 8 billion dollars in today’s money.
This is my new favorite movie stat.