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.
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.