Which Batman Film Was Most Successful?
Now that The Dark Knight has been displaced from the top of the box office and its ticket sales are finally beginning to slow down, we can finally start looking to see how it did.
Box Office Mojo, a website devoted to movie grosses, compared all modern Batman movies in one handy dandy chart. Be forewarned. There’s enough numbers and stats to make even the Batcomputer’s cursor change into the hourglass icon. Some of the more interesting figures (but keep in mind that The Dark Knight numbers aren’t finalized yet):
Biggest Domestic Gross: The Dark Knight $471,082,150
Biggest Production Budget: The Dark Knight $185 million
Best Second Weekend Retention: Batman -25.7%
Chart Ranking of All Time Movies (Adjusted for Inflation): The Dark Knight at #39
So there you go. Christian Bale beats down Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, and George Clooney easily. Though Rhett Butler still kicks Bruce Wayne’s ass as the #1 movie of all time.
Those "adjusted for inflation" analyses have always seemed like sour grapes to me, a way to keep Gone With the Wind at the top of the charts. Nobody in Hollywood wants to know how much money their film would have made 20 years ago, they care about how much they made now. Pure uncorrected boxoffice is really the only way to track success, since everything else can be argued one way or another. The Adjusted for inflation numbers are only an approximation, anyway. This means that as time passes, more recent films will unseat others on the list as ticket prices rise. The fact that all of Lucas' and Spielberg's films have stayed on the list even after that's considered is a testament to their staying power.
"Adjustef or inflation" isn't about how much a film would have made seventy years ago – it's about how many people actually *saw* it.If tickets were – say – a quarter on average in 1938, and ten bucks in 2008, then a film that grossed twenty million in 2008 sold fewer tickets than a film that grossed three-quarters of a million in 1938.My parents bought a brand-new house in Cleveland for $5000 in 1950. An online calculator i found recently gives that same house (literally – that exact house) a current "market value" of $114,000. Is the $114K house bigger than the $5K one? No.Is a film whose gross is larger than another film, even though the other film sold more tickets, albeit at a lower price "bigger" or "more popular" than the older film?No.