This year I have frequently referred to box office figures on the blog, both old and new ones. The more I have used it though, the more obvious it has been how flawed the concept is, and how undependable the figures are. The website that is most frequently referenced when it comes to Hollywood box office figures seems to be Box Office Mojo (owned by IMDb, which is owned, not unexpectedly, by Amazon). I have used it myself for gathering statistics for earlier posts. But it has some weaknesses that illustrate the precarious nature of box office figures, especially those from earlier decades.
They have for example a "Top Lifetime Grosses" list, and it seems to be updated on a daily basis. The top ten Domestic list on 28 August, 2021, was as follows:
Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens (2015)
Avengers: Endgame (2019)
Avatar (2009)
Black Panther (2018)
Avengers: Infinity War (2018)
Titanic (1997)
Jurassic World (2015)
The Avengers (2012)
Star Wars: Episode VIII - The Last Jedi (2017)
Incredibles 2 (2018)
This tells us almost nothing of value, other than the presence of Titanic. It can only be of interest to the accountants, and it is unclear why these figures are reported in the news with such devotion. (That is about the change as streaming takes over from cinemas since streaming numbers are less available, less dependable, and barely useful.) As inflation means that ticket prices steadily increase, the more recent a film is, the more likely it is that it will end up on the top ten list, unless you adjust it for inflation. Although the list above claims to be an all-time list, you will not be able to draw any conclusions about the popularity of these films compared to films made in previous decades, you can only compare them with each other. This is why the presence of Titanic is interesting, because it is about twenty years older than the other films and therefore we can say with some certainty that it was a lot more popular than all the other films on the list, including the ones above it. At least if we know how much the tickets cost. As Titanic was 195 minutes long, the price of the tickets when it came out could be a lot higher than that for a regular ticket, so you need to be aware of that as well when calculating its popularity. [Amendment: A reader asked whether ticket prices for longer films, such as Titanic, really were higher in the US or if this is a European thing. It has happened in the US but I am not certain about Titanic, so that is a subject for further research. It only adds to the difficulties.]
If you manage to find out how to make the all-time list adjusted for inflation on Box Office Mojo, you will get the following top ten:
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope (1977)
The Sound of Music (1965)
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982)
Titanic (1997)
The Ten Commandments (1956)
Jaws (1975)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
The Exorcist (1973)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
As you can see this list is very different. There are no Marvel films on it for example, and the previous number one is not on there at all. Whereas in the first list, the oldest film was Titanic, from 1997, after adjustment to inflation Titanic is instead the most recent film on the top ten. If you want to get an idea of which films have been the most popular over time, this list is more useful whereas the earlier one was useless. Alas, this one is also unreliable, not least since box office figures of the past cannot be trusted. Films and figures can be wrong, or missing completely. On Box Office Mojo, Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Easy Rider (1969), and The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams (1974) do not appear on any lists, despite being very popular. It seems that Box Office Mojo has no figures at all for them for their original releases. On another site, The Numbers, they have a list called "All Time Domestic Inflation Adjusted Box Office" but for some obscure reason that list only includes films released after 1977, so despite its name it is not an "All Time" list of any sort.
One of the most referenced books for these figures is The Hollywood Story, but it too has flaws and omissions. One example: on the list of most popular films from the period 1961 to 1970, My Fair Lady (1964) is missing, despite being one of the decade's biggest successes. Whoever wants to use these statistics, such as me, has a lot of hurdles to deal with, especially since you will only be aware of key films missing if you already knew that they should have been included.
To add to the confusion there are different ways of reporting these figures, which means that you cannot collect a figure here and a figure there without verifying what the figure represents. Is it domestic rentals? Is it international grosses? Is it for the year of release only, or are re-releases included? Sometimes this is not specified at all, in which case you might as well not use the figure, since you do not know what they mean.
In the past, different studios differed in the reliability of their numbers, or even whether they reported any at all. As I wrote about in an earlier post, MGM and Warner Bros. are for example more dependable than Paramount in this regard. But no list of the box office hits of any given year in the past, at least prior to the 1990s, can be taken at face value. They are almost certainly wrong, and alas that is also true for the top ten lists I have made and presented on the blog earlier in 2021. They are probably more accurate than many other lists you might find in books or online, such as those on Wikipedia, but that is not saying much. One of the most watched films of the 1940s was one called Mom and Dad (1945), but as it was a sensational "sex hygiene" film about the horrors of sex and unwanted pregnancies, you will hardly ever see it mentioned about box office hits, or even mentioned at all in film history books. It was not included on my list for 1945 although it probably should have been.
Talking about film history books, it is dispiriting that in most such books I have read, or biographies of actors and directors, in which box office figures are mentioned, the writers have hardly ever done any due diligence. They use one source for their numbers, such as Box Office Mojo, and accept it uncritically. This is a problem in itself, but when you also try to base some theoretical musings on these numbers you are almost doomed to failure.
But despite their unreliability they can still provide an idea of what was popular, if nothing more. I will not pursue that research any longer because the work is not sufficiently rewarding, but I can still use the material I have already gathered for the occasional article.
When I have been gathering the figures I have been using many different sources (as one must) and here are they, at least the ones I remember having used:
Box Office Mojo, The Numbers, Ultimate Movie Rankings, Worldwide Box Office, Box Office Madness.
An article from The Argus Weekend in 1944.
Lots of articles and lists in Variety, such as this one and another one from October 15, 1990, which is not linkable.
Articles in Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television about the box office figures for Warner Bros., RKO, and MGM.
Books such as Success in the Cinema - Money-Making Movies by John Howard Reid, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records by Cobbett Steinberg, The Hollywood Story by Joel W. Finler, The Hollywood Reporter Book of Box Office Hits by Susan Sackett, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: a Hollywood History by Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale, and several biographies of studios, producers, actors, and directors.
Annual publications such as International Motion Picture Almanac.
Use them with caution.
