Dark Knight reality check; three reasons why it’s not a major hit
Filed by Richard on Friday, August 1, 2008 at 4:10 pm
With the tremendous success of the Dark Knight in the movie theaters, blogs and entertainment news outlets are falling all over themselves to anoint the film, in advance, as the soon-to-be most successful film of all time.
Please. The Dark Knight has a fairly giant uphill climb before it even enters the top 25. Can we get serious about how we define success?
1) Inflation Adjustment
To compare box office results across different eras, it’s important to equalize the measuring stick. The fact is that a dollar went a lot further in 1968 than in 2008. Fortunately the holy grail of box office office web site, Box Office Mojo, did this legwork for us. They have a formula based on generally accepted inflation rates, to show how much movies of different eras would have made in current dollars.
The upshot is that the supposed current champ, Titanic, has actually made 908 million dollars domestic in current dollars, not the 600 million typically reported. And Titanic isn’t even in the top five. The Ten Commandments, E.T., The Sound of Music, Star Wars, and Gone with the Wind are all well ahead of Titanic. Gone with the Wind, in fact, made 1.4 BILLION dollars adjusted for inflation. By this standard, the Dark Knight has a very long way to go to catch up. As of today, the Dark Knight‘s 350 million dollar haul put it at number 13 on the all-time list. But if you adjust for inflation, that figure drops precipitously to number 94.
2) International Haul
It’s interesting that box office receipts are reported in the news almost exclusively in terms of domestic receipts. Given the incredible weakness of the American dollar, and the growth in the international markets, most of the money a modern movie brings in typically comes for overseas. In the cast of the Dark Knight, this will almost certainly ultimately be the case as well. Yet the domestic market is the sole indicator typically used to measure success.
Look at Titanic again. It brought in an astounding 600 million domestic in 1997 dollars. But it also brought in an incredible 1.2 BILLION additional dollars internationally for a full take of 1.8 billion dollars. This emphasis on the domestic take has the effect of giving the impression that major money makers were actually flops. Consider Troy, the sand and sandals epic of four years ago. It brought in what was considered a weak domestic haul of 133 million. But worldwide the movie brought in half a billion dollars. Yet is is still considered a massive underperformer in many circles. The point is that in the modern marketplace, we should stop talking exclusively about domestic haul and start reporting on the worldwide box office first.
3) Number of tickets sold verus population
If we’re going to adjust box office numbers for inflation, we should also consider just how many butts were put in seats during the theatrical run of the film, and contrast those numbers with the actual domestic population at the time to get a more accurate picture of the relative popularity of the film. (The domestic take also includes Canada, but I’m just going to focus on the US).
the Dark Knight’s current 350 million domestic haul, this means that about 43 million tickets have been sold at about 8 bucks a ticket.
Let’s compare this to 1982, when E.T. ruled the theaters. Adjusted for inflation, E.T. made one billion dollars domestic,with means that about 125 million tickets would have been sold at an inflation adjusted 8 bucks a ticket.
So clearly the E.T. haul is much, much higher than the Dark Knight; it is even more successful when you realize that the US Population in 1982 was only 232 million compared the the current US Population of 303 million. Meaning that there were tickets sold for more than half of the population. The current take for the Dark Knight isn’t even at one ticket sold for every six Americans.
It would be harder to compare to Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and The Ten Commandments, because they had initial “Road Show” releases at significantly higher ticket prices, but the facts are fairly clear: in much smaller markets, these film put many, many more butts in seats than the Dark Knight will ever hope to do.
None of this is meant to particularly rain on the parade of the Dark Knight. The film is doing fantastically well. But if you were to utilize accurate methods of comparison against other tops movies, the Dark Knight is almost certain to end up as an also ran.
