A Dollar Today…
7/21/08
Obviously summertime is when the majority of blockbuster Hollywood films are released, and the main driver of success of the movie seems to be the opening weekend numbers of the film. It seems that each year a film opens that tops the previous record of highest opening weekend gross (in North America that is). This got me thinking because one small project was adjusting prices of stocks to take into consideration splits and dividends (and try to mimic Yahoo!Finance’s methods as accurately as possible)…
So this past weekend, the biggest movie was obviously The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, which grossed $155.3 million, and beat out Spiderman 3 which grossed $151.3 million just last year. So I began to do some research into how impressive the feat really was (and by “research” I mean that I Googled “what are the highest adjusted grossing movies of all time”).
At http://www.the-numbers.com/movies/records/ I found that when grosses for movies are adjusted for inflation, the already lofty grosses of some classic movies become even loftier. For example, Titanic, which grossed just over $600 million in its run nationally in 1997-1998, would have grossed $886 million in today’s dollars. Thats almost a 50% increase! Inflation has something to do with that, but ticket prices could also be to blame.
Considering all moves, Gone with the Wind grossed the most adjusted money of all time with $1.2 billion dollars.
-Amit
akooner@brilliont.com
Tags: Batman, Gone with the Wind, Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Titanic
