Na’vi vs. Scarlett and Rhett

The film Avatar's grabbed headlines as well as eyeballs, grossing a remarkable $1 billion in its first few weeks of release. But historical comparisons of sales figures are greatly improved by adjusting for inflation, and that produces a blowout sales leader from long before computer graphics were a gleam in James Cameron’s eye: 1939’s epic Gone With the Wind.

There are a variety of ways to figure it. Taking the reported worldwide gross for GWTW (about $400 million) and adjusting it to today’s dollars using the federal government’s online inflation adjuster gets you a worldwide gross for that film, in 2009 dollars, of $6.2 billion. Instead use average ticket-price inflation (reportedly 23 cents in 1939, vs. $7.18 in 2009) and you get an even bigger adjusted number.

Nothing, in an admittedly quick check, comes close, but others do produce impressive totals. Adjusting Star Wars’ worldwide gross from 1977 to 2009 dollars produces a figure of $2.8 billion. 1997's Titanic comes in at an adjusted $2.5 billion. The Sound of Music, adjusted from 1965 dollars, has grossed nearly $2 billion.

These movies of course have had much longer than Avatar to rack up their grosses, and indeed using the year of their release as the baseline for all their sales pumps up their actual total – it’d be better to calculate it on a year-to-year basis, adjusting for each year’s inflation.

Then again, another approach would be to consider these films’ return on investment. GWTW reportedly cost an estimated $3.7 million to produce; that’s about $58 million in today’s dollars. The production cost of Avatar reportedly was on the order of $280 million – nearly five times higher. With GWTW’s lower costs and far higher adjusted gross, those Na’vi have light years to go to before they lay a glove on Scarlett and Rhett.

Evening afterthought:

A colleague has suggested another comparison, in which GWTW again prevails, at least for the time being. Boxofficemojo.com is reporting that Avatar's domestic sales reflect around $352 million of its worldwide total, which translates into roughly 49 million tickets. If we were (generously, for these purposes) to say that's adults only (surely not) it'd represent a bit more than 20 percent of the 18+ population. In a Gallup poll in January 1942, by contrast, 50 percent of American adults said they'd seen Gone With the Wind.