The all-time box office gross. Recently, more and more emphasis has been placed upon this idea, with movie studios desperately trying to get as much money as they can with a single movie, breaking records that may or may not be made up along the way (highest grossing movie opening on the second Wednesday in May!).

Curiously, there are two different lists of the all-time greats. One with Gone With the Wind, Star Wars, and The Sound of Music rounding out the top three, and the other with Titanic, The Dark Knight, and Star Wars. The former list adjusts for inflation, while the latter list just has the dollar amount that it made at the time. The popular thing to do, it seems, is to discount the recent movies in favor of the first list that I mentioned.

However, I most certainly do not agree with this sentiment.

Up until the eighties, the sole venue for watching movies was at the theater, save for the few television presentations that happened once in a while throughout the years. Movies were constantly re-released, allowing their box office gross to grow decades after they were first released. Today, its amazing if a movie is still at the theaters three months after it was released. And don’t hold your breath for a re-release.

There is also the subject of the relative cost to see a movie; back when Gone With the Wind reigned supreme, the movie cost could easily be covered with coins. Back then – and even continuing for years to come – movie tickets cost less than a loaf of bread. Now, tickets cost the same as maybe three loaves of bread. But wouldn’t that inflate the box office prices even more? Not necessarily; because of the high prices for a ticket, people are going to fewer movies. Especially since an hour’s pay of minimum wage (the most common pay for a teenager, the prime movie going audience) barely covers the price of a medium size soda, much less a ticket to the movie itself.

Societal traditions also play a part in this; decades ago, going to the movies was considered a common past time, and people would often go see the same picture several times. Now, people only see a movie more than once if it is absolutely amazing – Titanic and the Dark Knight being two prime examples.

Technology has also been a big inhibiting factor on many movies – how often have you heard “I’m going to wait until it comes out on DVD” or “I’m going to watch it when it comes out on HBO”? Truth is, I see more movies for the first time via the library or my movie channels, not the movie theater. VHS, the first popular method of watching movies at home, was created in the eighties, which meant that every movie from that point on was at a serious disadvantage in the box office chart. And then came the invention of the movie cable channels, and the recent movies fell even further down the inflation-adjusted chart.

There really is no accurate way to tell how much a movie has grossed when you throw in social and technological contexts into the mix, but I believe that the box office chart without an adjustment for inflation is the closest measurement to the true gross of a movie.