Barbie took $1.446 billion at the box office, it was the highest-grossing film of 2023 and is the 14th highest-grossing film ever. However, that doesn’t really tell you how popular it was, it just tells you it took a lot of money, and those two things are very, very different.

This seems to be a trend with cinema, looking at how much cash a film made, for that to then be used as a boast to indicate its popularity or even its quality. But that’s not how it works. When a musical artist releases a song or album, how much money it makes is not what has it climbing up the charts, it’s how many units it sold that does. A song or album is declared as going platinum because it sold one million copies or more, not because it made $1 million.

As an example, If I Google ‘best-selling music artists’, I get a list of the best-selling music artists by how many units they have sold. The Beatles are number one with 183 million units certified sales. How accurate that is, I don’t know, nor does it really matter. The point is that music artists are ranked by the number of units (records) sold and not by how much money they have made. Yet, if I Google ‘best-selling films’, I don’t get a list of films ranked by the units sold. I get a list of films ranked by how much money they have made (quick aside, Barbie is not on that list as it was up to July 2023 and Barbie was released at the end of July 2023).

So here’s a valid question. Why is there this insistence of measuring a film’s success by its box office and not its ticket sales? All of the major entertainment sites do it too, they all post articles looking at how much money a film had made in its opening weekend, week and month, etc. Yet none of them ever report on how many tickets the film sold. Just going back to the list of best-selling films that I linked to, James Cameron’s Avatar is top of the charts with $2.92 billion… but that doesn’t tell you how many tickets were sold.

With music and ranking the best-selling musical artist, a unit sale is a unit sale. But how many units (tickets) did Avatar shift to make that $2.92 billion? In fact, Avatar isn’t even the best-selling film as reported. 1939’s Gone with the Wind beats that with its $3.9 billion, adjusting for inflation, a billion more than Avatar. And this is key right here, the inflation factor. You don’t need to adjust for inflation with the best-selling musical artist because (as covered) a unit sale is a unit sale. Monetary value changes yearly, inflation and other elements mean that $1 in 1939 had a very different value than $1 in 2024.

Then there are the cinemas themselves, ticket prices differ from country to country, city to city, cinema to cinema and even the time of day. There’s a cinema close to me that does half-price tickets mid-week during the afternoon, but full-price the rest of the week and at night. So then, if 50 people go to watch a film mid-week when it is half-price tickets and 25 go to watch a different film when it is full-price, they make the same amount of cash at the box office, even though one film sold double the tickets of the other. Look at the price differences for 3D or IMAX over normal screenings too. 100 people watching an IMAX screening will make more money than 100 people watching the same film with a non-IMAX screening, but a ticket sale is still a ticket sale. Ergo, the box office is a skewed and flawed way to measure how well a film has done.

I got into this whole thing because I got into an Internet chat that claimed Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises was the ‘best Batman film’ because it made over $1 billion. But that’s not strictly true. Tim Burton’s Batman made $411.6 million in 1989. Allowing for inflation, that’s also over $1 billion. What would be more interesting would be to see how many tickets each film sold. Just going back to Gone with the Wind, it made (allowing for inflation) $3.9 billion in the 1930s. Cinemas were very different back then. There were no multi-screen cinemas, there were fewer cinemas overall and films had far fewer screenings per day too. So, Gone with the Wind made more than Avatar did (allowing for inflation) with far fewer showings. The same thing with Batman. By 1989, multi-screen cinemas existed, but they were not as numerous or as big as they are today. So Batman made its money with fewer overall screenings than The Dark Knight Rises did.

The first time I went to the cinema was in the early ’80s. It was a local cinema and it only had one screen. It would show more than one film though. Let’s say there were five screening slots a day, the cinema would show the newest release a few times a day, usually a morning, an afternoon and an evening show. Then older films would get one of the other slots between the newest release. Some single-screen cinemas would only show one film and if you wanted to see a different film, you’d have to go to a different cinema. Look at cinemas now, and new releases often get more than one screen and multiple screenings a day. Cinemas are open earlier and close later now than back in the ’80s too. So older films performed better (selling more tickets) with fewer screenings and with cheaper tickets too, no 3D or IMAX artificially beefing up sales back then.

If you were to take the top 20 best-selling movies of all time and adjust for inflation, then the top 20 would be very different from how it is currently reported. Films from decades ago would be outperforming films from the last few years. We already know that Avatar is not number one despite all major sites reporting as much. Yet, if you take the top 20 best-selling musical artists of all time and adjust for inflation, nothing would change because they are measured by units sold and not by money made and is that not a far better method?

Of course, it would be pretty much impossible to know how many tickets Gone with the Wind sold compared to Avatar because nobody really kept count in 1939. Plus, cinema tickets were not sold by film, they were just sold by admittance. You bought a ticket to the cinema and watched whatever film was on. Some cinemas may have had specially printed tickets with the name of the film on, but most just had something like ‘admit one’ on them and the cinema that the ticket was for, they were just a general admittance ticket.

Nobody really kept count of how many tickets were sold for a film. But now? Knowing how many tickets each film has sold is recorded very easily, and cinemas relaying that info to the studios would be simple. Ergo, Barbie taking $1.446 billion at the box office, being the highest-grossing film of 2023 and the 14th highest-grossing film ever doesn’t really mean what it seems because films from 20, 30, 40+ years ago were doing just as well and sometimes, even better… allowing for inflation and sold more tickets to do so too.