Zoe Saldana in Avatar (WETA / 20th Century Fox)
Following an estimated $48.5 million take over the weekend, the total gross of James Cameron's Avatar currently stands at $429m. The sci-fi spectacle is now the seventh biggest blockbuster ever at the domestic box office (not taking inflation or higher 3D/IMAX ticket prices into account), slightly ahead of the Johnny Depp vehicle Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest ($423.3m) and slightly behind George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace ($431m). By next Friday, Avatar will likely be #4, right behind Lucas' 1977 Star Wars ($460.9m).
Now, things change quite a bit when inflation is added to the box-office mix, even without considering Avatar's 3D/IMAX premium surcharges — and those can add quite a bit to the cost of a movie ticket. As of Sunday, Box Office Mojo estimates that Avatar is #58 in the all-time domestic box-office chart adjusted for inflation. The state-of-the-art 3D epic is slightly ahead of Back to the Future (1985) and slightly behind Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005).
If Avatar adds another $20-$25 million by Friday, as it quite likely will, it'll land on that list's 50th spot — right behind a 2D, black-and-white movie made in 1945 by a studio (RKO) that no longer exists, The Bells of St. Mary's (above), with state-of-the-art special effects consisting of Bing Crosby's vocal cords and Ingrid Bergman's Swedish accent. (For more on The Bells of St. Mary's, check out Shooting Down Pictures.)
Some of the movies Avatar will have passed: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ (2004), Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), George Cukor's musical My Fair Lady (1964), Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man 2 (2004), the Paul Newman-Steve McQueen disaster melodrama The Towering Inferno (1974), and Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003).
Once again, it's always good to remember that those are approximations based on average ticket prices — which can vary widely depending on where a movie made most of its money, e.g., a top-dollar New York house or in thousands of flea-ridden small-town theaters that charged a quarter per ticket. It's also worth remembering that population increases, changes in movie-going demographics, and the growth of entertainment alternatives should all be taken into consideration when comparing the box-office success of movies from different eras.