Clarion Content

The story has been everywhere. Avatar is a $1 billion dollar movie. It is the highest grossing movie of all time. But as we have long heard, "There are three ways to not tell the truth: lies, damned lies, and statistics." Is Avatar's claim to be the biggest movie ever subject to this cliche? An interesting article in the Los Angeles Times makes the case.

The issue in question as the LA Times frames it, is Avatar the largest box office movie ever? As is so often the situation, the answer depends on how one frames the question. Avatar is indeed the biggest grossing moving of all-time when analyzing gross revenues, i.e. total dollars. However, when the metric is changed to adjust for inflation, the Avatar is nowhere to be found.

The biggest movie of all-time for individual ticket sales, i.e. fannies in the seats, and the biggest movie of all-time when considering inflation adjusted gross revenues are the same flick, "Gone With Wind." It garnered what would be in today's dollars nearly $1.5 billion in ticket sales. To give you an idea, dear readers, of just how different the two lists are, check this out from the Times: the all-time not adjusted for inflation gross revenue top 50 list includes only five films from before 1997, but check the adjusted for inflation gross revenue top 10 list, there's only one film, "Titanic," that was released in the last 30 years.

This phenomenon is part of longer term trend in American cultural history where folks conflate the most recent and the best. America wants everything that is new to be improved, new and improved are as linked as peanut butter and jelly in the American psyche. It is not good enough to simply be the best home run hitter or the best sprinter of one's era, one must be the best ever. The Clarion Content worries that this kind of thinking provokes a vicious cycle that labels far too many tremendous efforts failures. The movies are apparently not exempt. The LA Times writer, Patrick Goldstein sums it up well, "I don't know about you, but when I think of how much cultural heft a film has, I'm more interested in how many people enjoyed the communal delight of being in front of the big screen, not simply how much money they had to pay to see it."

Lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Labels: Pop Culture, thought