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Best Weekend NeverWhy journalists don't account for inflation when they report box office records.

By Zachary Pincus-RothPosted Monday, July 6, 2009, at 7:03 AM ET

Read more from Slate's Summer Movies special issue.

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Zachary Pincus-Roth is a writer in Los Angeles who has written about entertainment for the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Variety, and other publications.
Photograph of Clark Gable with Vivien Leigh in Gone With the Wind © 1939 MGM.
COMMENTS

Thank. You.

This phenomenon has annoyed me for years, and this article did a fine job outlining the case against the "Number of current, unadjusted-for-inflation dollars raked in" standard for gauging the historic popularity of a film.

I would love to see a statistics guru like Nate Silver weigh in on this. As Zachary points out, a true barometer of the most popular films of all time should also take in the percentage of Americans who saw the film. I would bet good money that a greater percentage of Americans saw Gone with the Wind in 1939 than will see Up this year, for example.

There should be a formula for weighting adjusting-for-inflation dollars, percentage of population who saw the film, and possibly other factors to arrive at an approximation of what films were actually the most well-attended in the context of their release date. Only nerds would pay attention to such a score, so what's the harm?

-- MadameLibn
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