NationStates Jolt Archive

First off: I love Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope. It's my favorite movie. I am a Star Wars fanatic, I own dozens (if not hundreds) of SW novels and short story compilations. I buy all the video games, rent the movies, bookmark all the web-sites, and would go to the conventions (if they ever had them).

But I can't believe that Titanic is the only movie to have surpassed it in box office sales. I just can't. Even if it is just due to inflation prices (meaning that less people going to a movie still generates higher sales) there must have been something else.

Not the other Star Wars movies, not the Lord of the Rings, not the Passion of the Christ, not even Finding Nemo (which does hold the place for most DVD sales). Can anybody explain this to me? How in almost 30 years there hasn't even been two movies to pass $460,935,665.

My informations comes from http://www.imdb.com/Charts/usatopmovies

Well that's pretty simple: 12 year old girls in love with Leonardo DiCaprio easily have more money than 17 year old guys in the 70's watching Star Wars. There was never a chance that there would be any competition on this one.

Hmm...does that site only count the original, or include the special edition as well? Also, does it take into account the value of 1977 dollars vs. 1997 dollars? Not that it would make that much difference, but you never know.

cuz star wars has 30 years worth of advertising to go off of. give LOTR a few years and it'l be up there.

cuz star wars has 30 years worth of advertising to go off of. give LOTR a few years and it'l be up there.

What do you mean? I think that list only count money made int theaters

cuz star wars has 30 years worth of advertising to go off of. give LOTR a few years and it'l be up there.

This is just box office sales, not total money made, right? Because I know that Titanic ran for about five weeks in my middle-of-nowhere town, but I don't think I've ever seen any titanic action figures or anything like that.

they re released the movies back into theaters a couple years ago as "special editions, so they got extra cash for that.

If you were to take into account inflation, I believe Gone With The Wind actually would have (has?) made more.

It only counts box office sales, it doesn't count the special editions (if it did they'd each be near the billion dollar range), and it doesn't adjust for inflation (which is why in the first post I said that you'd expect inflation to change stuff)

double post

It only counts box office sales, it doesn't count the special editions (if it did they'd each be near the billion dollar range), and it doesn't adjust for inflation (which is why in the first post I said that you'd expect inflation to change stuff)

Oh, my bad. For some reason I thought it had to do with the fact that theaters raised prices for Titanic-the one I went to did. Stupid Titanic.

The real story is the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles beat out The Godfather.

no words....

I think that the domestic box office counts both releases of Star Wars.

Yeah, if you look under Star Wars box office & business you see that they are including BO returns from 1997 in their figure.

Inflation has to be accounted for when comparing box office revenues, otherwise it's just silly. In that case, "Gone With the Wind" was the highest grossing movie of all time. In terms of tickets sold, I haven't a clue as to what movie produced the most.

Once you adjust for inflation, Titanic isn't even in the top 5, it is actually number 6, the top 5 (in order) are (1st number is adjusted gross, 2nd number is original gross, last is year of release):

1 Gone With the Wind
MGM
$1,218,328,752
$198,655,278
1939

2 Star Wars
Fox
$1,074,061,157
$460,998,007
1977

3 The Sound of Music
Fox
$858,764,718
$158,671,368
1965

4 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Uni.
$855,381,641
$434,974,579
1982

5 The Ten Commandments
Par.
$789,930,000
$65,500,000
1956