AVATAR: #20 at the Domestic Box Office (Inflation Adjusted)
If 3D/IMAX surcharges are factored in, Avatar would drop quite a bit on Box Office Mojo’s inflation-adjusted chart. As I’ve explained in the comments section of a previous Avatar post, the 3D/IMAX premiums can add somewhere between 25-30 and 40 percent to Avatar’s grosses. Most other movies, including the vast majority of recent releases, don’t have that sort of advantage — certainly not to Avatar’s extent, as 80% of its domestic gross has come from 3D and/or IMAX screenings.
Even if you opt for the lower end of the scale and subtract only 25% from Avatar’s earnings — in order to better estimate where James Cameron's sci-fi adventure would rank in number of tickets sold — the film would have earned to date (Feb. 9) $475.2 million, placing it at #51, ahead of Peter Jackson's 2003 fantasy epic The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and a couple of million dollars behind Leo McCarey's 1945 comedy-drama The Bells of St. Mary's, made in the days when Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman were two of Hollywood's top box-office stars.
If you opt for a mid-level percentage, or about 33%, Avatar’s "2D-equivalent revenues" would be $422.4m, which would place it at #71, slightly ahead of David Lean's 1962 political epic Lawrence of Arabia (above, and with which Avatar has thematic elements in common) and slightly behind Steven Spielberg's 1977 sci-fi drama Close Encounters of the Third Kind (including the 1980 rerelease).
Once again, bear in mind that those are approximations based on "average" ticket prices provided by the National Association of Theater Owners. (Box Office Mojo came up with its own estimated average — $7.61* — for 2010.) An accurate calculation of a film’s popularity at the box office — as in, the number of tickets sold (and its ratio to the population size at the time of the movie's release) — would be based on where the movie made most of its money, e.g., a top-dollar New York house or in thousands of cheaper small-town theaters.
Avatar's ticket prices, for instance, cost much more than the purported $7.61 "average" for 2010. In fact, most releases — whether new or old — that earn(ed) most of their revenues in major urban centers are at an advantage on those charts, whereas movies that did well in smaller towns or those made for children (lower prices for kids, matinees) are at a disadvantage.
It’s also worth remembering that population increases, changes in movie-going demographics, and the growth of entertainment alternatives (home video, cable television, pay-per-view options) should all be taken into consideration when comparing the box-office success of movies from different eras. And that many of the movies found on Box Office Mojo’s inflation-adjusted chart had one or more rereleases throughout the years.
And finally, Avatar is still bringing in lots of cash and will probably keep doing so in the next few weeks. More "inflation-adjusted" updates will be posted in the near future.
* Instead of $7.35 as previously reported.
Photo: Avatar (WETA / 20th Century Fox); Lawrence of Arabia (Columbia)
I have seen several articles about the whole inflation thing but see how ify it gets when you have to guess length of release, cable and dvd eating into time at the box office. Growth of population. It just really becomes a guessing game with all the what ifs. I just don't see how you can compare movies from 40's years ago and further back. Really if you think about it when the talk about the top pop songs they really don't go back further than the rock era and a lot of times not back further than 1970. There is that obvious break at 1955 when the rock era began.
Reason, people just are not interested in something that far back for the most part. Even if you put say Gone With the Wind at the top what would that accomplish. Probably not much. Would people start demanding a return to that style of movie, I doubt it. Even the sequel to it Scarlett did only so so. You didn't see a mad rush of people to see it like when more recent sequels were made like Phantom Menace. I just don't see the advantage to dig up old movies. Those who do care know which ones they are, all the rest of the population will continue to ignore them.
I think it would be worth noticing that ALL the existing charts are DOMESTIC (i.e. north american), while Avatar is primarly an INTERNATIONAL success, over 70% of its gross comes from foreign contruies.
Although it is difficoult to make comparison adjusted by inflaction based on worlwide sellings, if you simply compare the percentage of domestic/worldwide sellings of all the movies in the 20 top seller adjusted by inflaction chart, you will find that Avatar has rougly tied Star Wars and that the only movies still haed of it are Titanic and GwtW.
To tie these two Avatar will need to make rougly 3 bilions $, which is not at all impossible IMHO
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>Your numbers are off. Box office mojo calculated out the 3d/IMAX ticket prices about a week ago and estimated up to that point it had sold about 60 million tickets. Using the $7.35 average, Avatar would have made atleast $440 million if everyone did not pay the extra charge for 3d/IMAX tickets.
No, the numbers aren't "off." At least no more "off" than anyone else's. Try handing out $10 at the box office in just about every theater in any major urban center and see if you'll be able to buy a ticket for "Avatar."
Box Office Mojo's Brandon Grey used a $10 average for the 3D screenings. He does explain that's just an approximation based on his observations of ticket prices nationwide. I'd have used something closer to $12 based on my own observations, especially considering that the "average" ticket price — as published by the National Association of Theater Owners — is way too low to being with. "Avatar's" 2D screenings don't cost $7.61 on average, you can bet on that. But as Grey explains in his piece, it's better to have an approximation than no idea whatsoever of how many tickets a movie has sold.
Here's the Box Office Mojo piece:
http://boxofficemojo.com/news/?id=2667
Money is money – no matter when collected! The success of Avatar is amazing $2.3 Billion and counting in 57 days! This record will not be broken anytime soon.
Your numbers are off. Box office mojo calculated out the 3d/IMAX ticket prices about a week ago and estimated up to that point it had sold about 60 million tickets. Using the $7.35 average, Avatar would have made atleast $440 million if everyone did not pay the extra charge for 3d/IMAX tickets.