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Old 2010.01.19, 03:16 AM   #89
kuro_neko
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Originally Posted by NIMH Rat View Post
^^^ Hollywood is not really in a "recession" right now....it just set a record for box office admissions. It's creatively near-bankrupt, but that's a different issue.

Gone With the Wind has always been and always will be the biggest hit of all time. No way can any film really match it unless something like the equivalent of 3 or 4 Avatars comes out. The factor to account for is not just revenue adjusted for inflation or number of admissions, but the percentage of viewers related to the population of America at the time.

Gone With the Wind sold 208,000,000 tickets in America through its initial run and releases. In 1939, the population of America was 131,000,000. So, basically, if you were living in America in 1939 you saw this movie. Which is four hours long.

By contrast, Avatar has so far sold about 70 million tickets at most. The average $7.35 they use to calculate for inflation is probably skewing low for Avatar, which had the more expensive IMAX tickets to take into account. The average ticket price for Avatar might be closer to 9 dollars, which would mean about 57 million tickets sold.

In other words, Avatar is currently between 1/4 and 1/3 of Gone With the Wind's box office. And in a country of over 250 million people, certainly a far smaller percentage of the population is going to see this than Gone With the Wind.

Neither one of these films is all that good, by the way.
but none of that matters because your not taking into account the economic climate of the time or technology. seriously, when gone with the wind came out what else were you going to do besides go and watch it repeatedly? its not like you could wait for a blu ray release three months later to purchase at almost the same cost of driving to a theatre and price of admission, or boot up the old pc and download it, or head over to china town and buy a 1 dollar bootleg. do you see what I am getting at? straight up statistics and numbers reporting inflation and percentage of total americans who view a movie are bs. especially if you want to talk about a movie like Twilight/New Moon, which is seeing target audiences returning to the threatres time after time, so it looks like a larger portion of the population has seen it, but in reality its just repeat viewings.
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