After seeing Avatar and reading all the hype that this movie is about to surpass Titanic as the highest grossing movie of all time, is it really? I even ranked movies based on their real rather than nominal revenue here to show that it isn't, but even that is not accurate of which are the best movies of all time.
There have been probably over one million movies released in movie theaters since their inception in 1896. (Even this date is debatable.) A database that includes all these movies, including the nominal revenue each earned from their movie theater sales, would be too cumbersome and time consuming to put together. So there has to be some criteria for determining which movies to include in such a data set, and nominal revenue is currently the sole criterion used.
The problem is, the consumer price index (CPI) was 10 in 1913, and is more than 214 in 2009. That means that money in this country has been devalued to where a dollar today is worth less than five percent of what it was worth in 1913. (Even here there is some discrepancy.) Even still, a movie theater ticket was priced at, say, 10ยข in 1910, while the average price today is about $9, or 90 times greater than its price in 1910. Consequently, the nominal revenue earned by a movie released in the last ten years is by a large factor greater than one released in 1910, if only because it takes so many more dollars to purchase a ticket today relative to one in 1910. Any ranking of movies based on nominal revenue will be heavily weighted toward movies released post-1980.
In fact, I have students do just this (rank the top 500 or so movies based on real revenue), and 13 of the top 20 movies ranked based on nominal revenue were released in 2000 or later. After adjusting for inflation, there are none in the top twenty.
There are probably dozens of movies released in the 1920s that don't make a list based on nominal revenue, but would be in the top ten if ranked by real revenue. A movie released in 1920 had to earn less than $24 million in nominal revenue in order to make the top ten list based on real revenue (like that I have listed here). But how many movies that earned just $24 million are on anyone's top grossing movies of all time?
Any ranking based on nominal revenue just to make the cut appears to shortchange movies released prior to 1980. However, prior to video cassette and DVD players, and especially before television sets became popular, movies were re-released to movie theaters every few years. This explains the popular presence of Disney movies in my top-ten rankings. But the nominal revenues of these movies are listed for the year in which the film was initially released, which means that ticket revenue from subsequent releases is overvalued when converting to real figures. Again, not all movies were re-released, but it's enough to raise questions about any ranking based even on real revenue.
So, let's just admit that there are some outstanding movies from every era and generation and let's stop trying to make quantitative judgments about them.
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