^^^ 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.