Box office records are an artificial metric. Designed to create hype, but it's not a accurate measurement. It counts the money, not the number of seats filled.
While there may be a small increase in the number of movie-goers every year, the next blockbuster movie will break "all the records" too. Ticket prices raise every few years, making it possible for this (movie) magic accounting outperform previous records.
It is sad when you think about it. The OP is right in that a new record will be shattered soon due to population and inflation, but simple growth tends to mask the actual level of a cultural phenomena that a movie represents.
Unfortunately, I have enough grey hair to remember when return of the Jedi came out. Up until now, there was nothing like it save maybe Titanic. There was simply buzz everywhere. People would camp out like it was a new iphone or something. Almost everyone you knew saw Jedi, even peop
Seats filled isn't the right metric for measuring popularity either. The number you want is views per capita. By that metric, Gone with the Wind is still king [wikipedia.org]. Not only is it the top-grossing film of all time in inflation-adjusted dollars, inflation-adjusted ticket prices were roughly half their cost today [medium.com]. So its adjusted $3.7 billion represents more than twice as many seats sold as Avatar's $3.2 billion. And it did it when the U.S. population was less than half what it is today, so its viewings per c
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings:
(3) Ha, ha, I can't believe they're actually going to adopt this
sucker.
Artificial Metric (Score:3)
While there may be a small increase in the number of movie-goers every year, the next blockbuster movie will break "all the records" too. Ticket prices raise every few years, making it possible for this (movie) magic accounting outperform previous records.
Dilution ruins history (Score:3)
Unfortunately, I have enough grey hair to remember when return of the Jedi came out. Up until now, there was nothing like it save maybe Titanic. There was simply buzz everywhere. People would camp out like it was a new iphone or something. Almost everyone you knew saw Jedi, even peop
Re: (Score:2)