Is this a box-office record with an asterisk?
Patrick GOLDSTEIN, Los Angeles Times
Issue date: 2/3/10 Section: Entertainment
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That's a question worth pondering, as "Avatar" has become the No. 1 all-time box-office movie - and a question that's likely to come up more frequently in the future. And I think it suggests that maybe it's time to change the way the industry ranks movies in box-office charts.
"Avatar," like so many modern-day movies, has benefited from the steep rise in ticket prices, especially in the new 3-D era. So should "Avatar's" box-office numbers carry an asterisk?
After all, if we were writing about the all-time box-office champ in terms of actual ticket admissions, it would still be "Gone With the Wind," David O. Selznick's 1939 sweeping historical romance that has riveted moviegoers for generations. If you put together an all-time box-office chart, adjusted for inflation, "Gone With the Wind" remains the undefeated, unrivaled champion, having earned an astounding $1.45 billion in ticket sales over the years. As box-office guru Hollywood.com's Paul Dergarabedian told me last week: "You never want to say never, but that's a record that I don't think will ever be broken."
In an adjusted-for-inflation, all-time box-office top 10 (compiled by Dergarabedian), "Gone With the Wind" is the easy winner, with George Lucas' 1977 "Star Wars" in the No. 2 slot, with $1.26 billion in grosses, followed by 1965's "Sound of Music," 1982's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" and 1956's "The Ten Commandments."
Jim Cameron's "Titanic" comes in at No. 6 on the chart (with $955 million) while "Avatar" doesn't even come close to making the top 10, with a mere $596 million in grosses. To give you an idea of how different the adjusted-gross box-office chart is from the all-time box-office chart we normally follow, "Gone With the Wind" doesn't make even the top 50 all-time box-office leaders chart - the one that now has "Avatar" on top.
To say that the chart we normally use is weighted toward modern-day movies would be an understatement. When Dergarabedian compiled the all-time box-office chart (that is not adjusted for inflation), only five of its top 50 films were released before 1997 - Lucas' original "Star Wars" trilogy, Spielberg's "E.T." and 1990's "Home Alone." The vast majority of films on the list were released in the last half-dozen years. But turn things around and check the adjusted-gross top 10 list, there's only one film - "Titanic" - that was released in the last 30 years.
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