All time domestic box office results adjusted for inflation (1 Viewer)

[Seth Paxton]

Okay, the OTHER big release came in 1967. I'm certain that accounts for a big chunk of income as well, thus altering the adjustment amount I would guess.

And the fact that GWTW has earned millions of dollars 30 years apart on two different occassions also shows that trying to explain the income on any factors tied strictly to a time period is going to be slightly (but not completely) flawed.

After all, were women in the exact same role in the late 60's? Were films like GWTW even the current fashion in '67?

Note that Ben-Hur has a similar level of adjustment to 10 Commandments (both from the same era).

I wish I could find the 67 numbers on GWTW. I will note that the 67 rate appears to be in the 5.0 range.

 

[Tom Ryan]

Factors like home video and tv viewings shouldn't count with box office scores because they're not controllable. It may be possible that less people see a movie because they could catch it on video instead, but that doesn't change the actual impact the film had. It's impossible to calculate exactly how things like home video will actually affect box office. In other words, second guessing doesn't help. You just need to look at what kind of impact the movie had on the populace, no matter which factors might prevent them from going.

I think the ultimate box office factor would go something like this:

Take the number of tickets purchased and divide that by the overall population...then, compare that to the current real price of a dollar during that time period and calculate the actual cost of the tickets today. This is the closest you could get to a truly accurate box office stat.

 

[Steve Christou]

This is the third or fourth time I'm posting this response, a list like this is meaningless, everyone went to the movies in the 30's, 40's and 50's, there was no real competition, there was radio and fuzzy B/W tv, the most routine movies were making a ton of money, while today people don't even have to go to the cinema, wait a few months and you can rent or buy it, young people would much rather play Playstation than go to the cinema, some well known HTF members regularly brag that they won't be seeing certain big movies at the cinema for one reason or another, just wait for the dvd. So my point is it all evens out in the end. For instance, Titanic was just as huge in 1997-1998 as Gone With the Bloody Wind was in 1939-1940, people who hadn't gone to the cinema in 20-30 years made an effort to get off their fat arses and go see what the fuss was about, and a lot of people (non-HTF folk ofcourse) liked Titanic enough to see it again and again and again.

 

[nousername]

Gone With the Bloody Wind

LOL!

 

[RobertR]

By the way, I heard on the radio that 2002 was a banner year for movie ticket sales (NOT necessarily boxoffice numbers). The actual number of tickets sold was the best since 1957 (when presumably people went to the movies more often).

 

[Colin Jacobson]

Unadjusted gross figures may be so skewed that they're meaningless, but at least they're accurate

Not always - my girlfriend told me she bought 15 tickets to Roger Rabbit so she could sneak into other movies. I'm convinced the she and her friends account for half the flick's gross...

 

[Damin J Toell]

After all, were women in the exact same role in the late 60's? Were films like GWTW even the current fashion in '67?

FWIW, my father, who saw the film on a date during that re-release, has said that all of the women in the audience gasped upon Clark Gable's first appearance on the screen. Presumably, the film was still somewhat in fashion at that time.

DJ

 

[Tim Glover]

There are exceptions like Titanic and My Big Fat Greek Wedding whose audience kept growing and staying steady for a long time...but it seems that most recent films have very short theater lives thanks in part to the "front loading" that they all do. Playing on a gillion screens opening weekend, then good luck finding it still playing somewhere decent 3 months later. I guess home video effects that too.

I do remember the 9th grade when Empire Strikes Back played for at least 6 months on the best screen in town.

My parents remember movies that lasted at theaters for what seemed like all year. This is probably nostalgia speaking or just not remembering correctly.

 

[Glenn Overholt]

No, Tim, some theaters actually did that. Some ran for more than 2 years, but these were not the mainstream theaters.

I heard once that a theater would get a movie for a week, and if sales were good enough, they could keep it for a second or a third, with no problems at all.

Today it is just, push, push.

Glenn

 

[SteveP]

The runs of one year or more were the roadshow releases of the 1950's and '60's.

 

[Jun-Dai Bates]

everyone went to the movies in the 30's, 40's and 50's, there was no real competition

My (limited) understanding is that this is not true. Theater was very much alive at the time, musicals were all the rage, and teenagers were but a small group of the audience. At the time, unless I am mistaken, a "night out" usually meant something theatrical, whereas now, a "night out" usually means the movies. Teenagers, meanwhile, probably didn't spend nearly as much time at the movies.

More importantly, we still don't know what we're measuring. Standard, unadjusted box office figures accurately (for the most part) measures something: how much money a given film made. Not a very useful measurement of anything.

But what are we measuring with adjusted figures? Popularity? If that's the case, then we'd better come up with a definition of that word, because I don't think we're likely to be working with the same definition otherwise. If it's not popularity, then we should come up with what we are trying to measure, because without that, most of this posting is really communicating anything useful.

If you are trying to measure the financial success of a film, then adjusted figures of the initial box office success (discounting rereleases) is a useful metric, because we don't really care about who went to see the film and how many people that was, but because we care about how much money it was, and how much a dollar was worth at the time. It is interesting to discover how much of the country's money was wrapped up in seeing the popular films of a given time period. Adding the rereleases throws in a monkey-wrench, because older films have an advantage of time that newer releases don't have. Not that the income earned from rereleases can't be used in useful metrics. . .

 

[Gary->dee]

Interesting. So even if The Guru opened in 1939 at 1,500 theaters it still would have bombed ridiculously.

 

[SteveP]

Isn't the number of tickets SOLD some kind of legitimate indication?

 

[Ken Chan]

Would it be incorrect for me to suspect that some Star Wars-related partisanship is at work here?

For or against? I always think it's the anti-Titanic contingent.

//Ken

 

[Seth Paxton]

Not really, as I said in some detail on page 1 you can't measure apparent value strictly on seats.

If I told you film A had FREE tickets and film B had $50 tickets and the films were otherwise equal in quality, would you still say that the number of patrons going to each film was any sort of indicator of the value of each film to society? Certainly you would be saying how many people went to the theater to see it, but that's not the same thing.


Pure income for a film relative to the costs of all other items of the time is the most accurate indication of a film's WORTH to society, if not it's effect (much trickier to measure). If you pay $40,000 for a Micky Mantle card, then that's it's worth to you. Period.

The problem in all this debate is that people sometimes forget that MONEY IS A REPRESENTATION, it has no value inherent to itself. When you give someone $5 it represents the effort to obtain that money or the goods you sold to get the money. It also can be measured as relative to what else you didn't buy with the same money.

At one time there was standardization of the value of a dollar versus precious metals (gold standard, silver certificates). This was abadoned (1971 in the US) for rather complex reasons outside the discussion here. The plot to Goldfinger explains one rather far fetched possible problem.

We could still try such a standardization by saying $1 = 1/100,000th of a house price, or 1 gallon of gas, etc. But you can see where that gets into trouble. Value of any one item is volitile. So we have the inflation index instead, tying the value of a dollar to an overall general idea of value.

For Americans this is the Consumer Price Index, or CPI. The CPI measures the increase in expenditures necessary to purchase a fixed basket of goods that the Bureau of Labor Statistics updates every ten to fifteen years.

The bottom line is that such adjustments simply say "hey, here's something, how much are you willing to pay for it". Society as a whole is the patron making the purchase. So what if they deemed other items more or less valuable at the time? In fact, that is the very point of such adjusted lists. GWTW was a bigger phenomenon than Star Wars simply because it held greater monetary value to American society. The specific reasons behind such values don't make this measure invalid.

As Lew pointed out, those factors ALREADY EXIST in the non-adjusted BO values too. What a list like this does is simply say "in today's dollars, how much did these films earn", period. That's a lot more interesting than comparing films from different eras AND on different value scales.

In fact I would question how anyone could postulate such cultural, social, and economic theories on the changing value of films WITHOUT an adjusted scale. The first freaking thing someone would say to me if I pointed out that a new car only cost $500 in some previous era would be to say "that's not the same dollar". They wouldn't say "yep, you have to work 40 times as many hours now to buy the same car" because that wouldn't be true.

If we wanted to see a true trend in the popularity of cars or bread or shoes we would need to compare their costs relative to their respective worlds first. Then we could say that people are more or less willing to pay for those items. That's just the opposite of such an adjustment being "worthless" as a measure.

everyone went to the movies in the 30's, 40's and 50's, there was no real competition

This is just not historically accurate. First of all any film historian will tell you that film's arose as competition with the LIVE THEATER. Many early filmmakers were vaudville style entertainers of various sorts, such as Melies (he was a magician first). This was the arena in which cinema was competiting early on.

Localizing only one factor is just ridiculous. We would have to list and consider a large group of factors, many of which would be on opposite sides of the debate.


However, the number one piece of DATA that makes the list relevent is the analysis of the number of films making the top of the list by ERA. Or for that matter an industrious person could show the total cinema income per year after adjustment as a means of normalization, not unlike what is done when comparing baseball players from different eras (dead ball vs live ball for example).

So if 50-55 brought in X dollars total and 90-95 brought in 1.1 times X, then you could normalize the BO for films from the two eras (multiply 50-55 BO by 1.1) in an effort to factor out all other parameters - that is, you would boost the BO for films from eras when people "didn't go to the cinema" and deflate BO for films from the "everyone went to the cinema" era.

That assumes such massive era fluctuations actually exist (I have never tried to find such data). And on top of that if you pick too small a window for an era (such as yearly) then you make the mistake of factoring in the BLOCKBUSTER, by assuming that every year has a Star Wars, etc. that will boost the total income for all of cinema. It could be argued that there is some total amount that society will spend on films so that blockbusters simply pull income away from other films, but this discounts the effect a blockbuster can have in bringing in the casual viewer that would not otherwise go to the cinema.


Anyway, if someone wanted to truly convince me of this idea that cinema is more or less popular financially between eras, this is the sort of data I would need to see.

Where's Dana when we need a number crunching freak worse than me?

 

[SteveP]

Prior to being shown on television in 1976, GONE WITH THE WIND was a top ten grossing film in every year it was released.

 

[Jun-Dai Bates]

Isn't the number of tickets SOLD some kind of legitimate indication?

Legitimate indication of what, is the question. And tickets sold when? And to whom? Total number of tickets sold during the initial release of a film is a legitimate indication of something, but exactly what that something is has yet to be resolved (it has barely been addressed) in this thread.

 

[Rob Gardiner]

Also, there were a lot fewer movies made that year, [1939] so it had less competition. I'm sure that theaters kept it playing for months.

I thought that studio output was much higher during the "classic" period of the 30s and 40s than it is today?