Inflation-Adjusted Box Office Totals
Zachary Pincus-Roth offers us a much-needed complaint about the habit of using nominal dollars when calling something or other the “highest-grossing movie of all time” or the “best-opening weekend.” Failure to adjust for inflation is always a bad idea, but in the case of these cinema lists it’s also horribly culturally distorting. The highest-grossing films in nominal terms includes a lot of mediocrities and is just very biased toward the recent. The correct list, by contrast, is a list of films that, while not necessary the best movies, are undeniably significant cultural icons:
- Gone With the Wind
- Star Wars
- The Sound of Music
- E.T.
- The Ten Commandments
- Titanic
- Jaws
- Doctor Zhivago
- The Exorcist
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarves
- 101 Dalmations
- The Empire Strikes Back
- Ben-Hur
- Return of the Jedi
- The Sting
- Raiders of the Lost Ark
- Jurassic Park
- The Graduate
- The Phantom Menace
- Fantasia
Now, the less said about The Phanton Menace and Titanic the better, but in general you’d have to say that cracking that list would be a pretty impressive achievement.
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