All Time Top Ticket Selling Movies

movie ticketStar Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) is now the number one movie when it comes to North America box office grosses.  The box office success of Star Wars 7 was incredible.  But, when you look at the all-time North America ticket sales leaders…..Star Wars: The Force Awakens has not even cracked the Top 10.

So with Star Wars: The Force Awakens now being listed as the biggest box office hit of all-time….we figured it would be interesting to look at the top ticket selling movies of all-time.  The following table shows all the movies in our database that sold more than 40 million tickets in North America.  If you compare our table to Box Office Mojo’s Adjusted For Inflation Leaders you will see some differences.  Box Office Mojo is awesome when looking at movies from 1982 to today.  Easily the best source on the internet.  Movies made before 1980 are not the strength of Box Office Mojo…as they often use box office rentals versus box office grosses.

We did some massive updates on this page today.   The good news is we now have more information on each of these blockbusters.  The bad news is our database is not letting us include our estimated ticket sells in the table….so we had to create a second table with those ticket numbers.   So if you sort the first table by adjusted domestic gross….it will rank the top box office movies from #1 Gone With The Wind to #275 The Aristocats.  To see the estimated ticket sell numbers you have to go to the second table.

Star-Wars-vs-Avatar

All Time Top Ticket Selling Movies Can Be Sorted 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by movie title and movie trailers
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by the stars of the movie
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by how much they earned in adjusted domestic box office (in millions)
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by estimated tickets sold (in millions)
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by critic and audience reviews
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by Oscar nominations and Oscar wins
  • Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movie by UMR Score…..UMR Score combines box office, reviews and awards
I know when to update this page….when ever a current movie reaches the $350.00 domestic mark that means it has reached the mighty 40 million tickets sold mark.
 
By request we also have produced a Top 250 Worldwide Box Office Movie List.
Steve Lensman’s Top 100 Ticket Selling Movies…Lots of Great Posters in this video.

148 thoughts on “All Time Top Ticket Selling Movies

  1. Much as I enjoy scanning your yearly reviews and this table of “All time top ticket selling movies”, I am nagged by certain questions. Most movies were sold at the average ticket price of the time and did not receive major reissues. Thus taking the boxoffice of the year of release and dividing it by the average ticket price that year gives a pretty accurate picture of its rank for the year, all-time $ rank and ticket sales. But in the case of movies such as Gone with the Wind and the early Disney animated movies each one had numerous successful reissues. Do your tables include re-issue revenue and adjust it for the price they were sold in each year which could be about double the average price of that year? And in the 50s and 60s many movies earned most of their boxoffice by being sold as roadshow (reserved seat) attractions (eg. The Sound of Music and Ben-Hur), again at about double the average ticket price of their year of release. In other words, when you calculate top ticket-sellers, as opposed to boxoffice takings, if there were two movies with identical boxoffice, but one was a roadshow, do you calculate the actual number of tickets of the roadshow as only half as many as the one sold at “regular price”? If not, the position of the roadshow in the list of top ticket sellers is much higher than is justified, is it not?

    1. Along those lines, Avatar’s box office numbers was based on selling 3D and IMAX 3D tickets at three to four times the ticket price of any 2D film. If ticket sales is just a calculation of box office divided by average ticket price it would way overestimate the number of actual tickets sold. But if all that is ever reported is dollar values then ticket counts would seem to be impossible to figure out. Even just for Avatar, there would be theaters with sales at multiple prices at the same theater at the same time. This doesn’t take anything away from Avatar as a blockbuster, it made money, but I’d expect that sort by A.B.O., and sort by tickets, should result in some movies changing rankings on the list.

  2. TOP 25 FAVOURITE ENTRIES: STILLS

    1/Capt Jack Sparrow
    2/Indie and his father!
    3/Ghost
    4/Joker
    5/Rogue One
    6/Hobbit 2012
    7/Forrest Gump
    8/Spidey 2002
    9/Heath Ledger
    10/Skyfall
    11/Frozen 2
    12/Two Towers – great!
    13/Mary Poppins
    14/”I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse!”***
    15/Lion King
    16/Avengers Assemble
    17/Jurassic World 2015
    18/Dr Zhivago
    19/The Force Awakens
    20/Ben Hur
    21/ET
    22/Avengers Endgame
    23/RIP poor Carrie – those were the days!
    24/Titanic
    25/”Frankly my dear I don’t give a d**n!”

    ***First uttered by The Duke in a low budget B western in his early days – but the snobs were not interested back then whereas after it became famous in Godpop there was even a hit record with the line as its title.

    I notice that only the first 5 entries have less than a $billion. We are on the brink of the era where to be in the Top 100 worldwide grosses a movie has to be also in the $billion club, which probably means that at some stage the Top 100 will be substantially crowded out by these action/super hero franchises!

  3. TOP 25 FAVOURITE ENTRIES: POSTERS

    1/Pirates of Caribbean 2003
    2/Terminator 2
    3/Hobbit 2
    4/Raiders of Lost Ark
    5/two for Aladdin
    6/Spiderman 3
    7/Rogue One
    8/Capt Marvel
    9/Transformers 4
    10/Dark Knight Rises
    11/Beauty & Beast
    12/Transformers 3
    13/Jurassic World 2018
    14/Iron Man 3
    15/The Last Jedi
    16/Lord of the Rings 2001
    17/The Graduate- unusual one.
    18/Lion King
    19/Empire Strikes Back
    20/The Force Awakens
    21/Jaws
    22/Avatar
    23/Both for Titanic
    24/25 Unique ones [to me] for Chucks 10 Cmmts and Ben Hur

  4. We Have discussed the conflicting worldwide grosses quoted for The Godfather 1972. Your adjusted worldwide gross of around $1.525 billion based presumably on ticket sales equates to an actual figure of around $285 million back in 1972 which is the approximate top figure quoted by Wikipedia and one other source.

    According to the Consumer Price Index [CPI] of the US Bureau of Labor Stats $285 million earned in 1972 would today have the purchasing power of just short of $1.8 billion [at 2019 prices]

    If your figures ARE based on ticket sales, the difference between your $1.525 billion for Godpop and CPI’s $1.8 billion would be explained by the fact, known to me for some time now, that between 1972 and 2019/20 ticket prices have inflated at a slower rate than general prices; the reverse was dramatically the case during the classic era.

    For example between 1945 and 2019 ticket inflation increased at nearly twice the rate overall of general price inflation. Esther Williams’ Thrill of a Romance earned $12 million domestically in 1945 according to WH and he quite correctly adjusts that figure to around $325 for ticket inflation. However $12 million in 1945 would have the purchasing power today of just approx $175 million [$173.4 to be exact] according to CPI.

    I found you video interesting as both a statistical exercise and a further pictorial summary of the 100 highest grossing films, this time worldwide, and it gave me personal satisfaction worth a 98% rating. My selections this time round are in Parts 2 and 3.

    Anyway it’s good to see you taking an interest, albeit late in the day, in box office stats. As Paul Henried said to Bogie at the end of Casablanca “With you on our side this time I know we’ll win!” [I like Humph very much, but I sometimes wish that Paul had said that to Laddie!]

    LADD FAN [In fan magazine] “Alan is the kind of screen hero whom, if you were in trouble and looked behind you, it would be comforting to see standing there.”

    SON o BOB “Yes, but you’d have to look down first!”

    1. Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info and trivia, always appreciated.

      Glad you liked the posters and stills, I don’t think there are lobby cards this time.

      At the end of the day this is all informed guesswork, Bruce and I might be dead on with our calculations or laughably way off.

      At best our charts give a useful insight into the movies that have most effectively succeeded in attracting the largest amount of people to line up at theaters (UK = cinemas) over the decades. It’s not perfect because many oldies do not have foreign grosses readily available.

      One website insists that Gone With the Wind has an adjusted gross of $7bn which is ridiculous, all they did was take the total gross of all the reruns and convert from 1939 to 2019. But where would GWTW be on the chart if it was never re-released? What was it’s initial 1939-1940 box office earnings?

      Like you mention in your post, blockbuster movies have to make at least a billion dollars these days to be considered really successful. Star Wars 9 has still not passed $1bn which must be making Disney a little jittery. They have many more SW movies planned for the future.

      Avengers Endgame cost $350m to make which is a crazy amount of money, it needed to pass $1bn to be profitable. It was worth it, grossing about $2.7bn in total. Eventually movies will pass the £3bn milestone in grosses. 🙂

      Next video will be next monday and it’s another top 100.

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