We’ve all seen the headlines “James Pauley and the attack of the killer mutant cyborg sheep: Part IV sweeps the box office with the biggest opening day of all time!”

Apparently, we, the simple-minded public, are supposed to be wowed and awed (and cajoled, via bandwagon propaganda) into seeing the movie. One thing I’ve noticed though: It seems everytime a new blockbuster movie comes out, it’s always “the biggest opening day of all time!” and only by a little bit. It got me thinking “I wonder what the biggest opening day was, of the top 10 opening days, when you adjust them all for inflation?”

Inflation for those of you that don’t know, is the creeping death of our almighty dollar. Every year, on average, our dollars are worth 3.2% than the year before. (This means, among other things, that the minimum wage which was stuck at $5.25 for several years, is actually only worth about $3 / hr when you adjust for inflation). What inflation also does, however, is skew price comparisons. We’ve all heard our grandparents say “I can’t believe how expensive ____ is! When I was a boy, I only paid a nickel for it!” More often than not, the price has only changed by a penny or two (AFTER ADJUSTMENT), and sometimes, such as in the case of eggs or milk, it’s actually CHEAPER (adjusted) than it was when Grandpa was a wee lad.

Back to movies.

So, here’s the data I’m working with, pulled from BoxOfficeMojo:

Calculating the CPI:

Ok, this is where a VERY SMALL amount of math comes in. It requires consulting a table, setting up a very simple proportion, and doing some multiplication. A calculator helps, but isn’t totally necessary. (Or, and you are going to LOVE me for this, you can use the BLS’s Inflation Calculator!!!)

First, we need to get our CPI numbers. CPI is an acronym for “Consumer Price Index”. It’s calculated, and maintained, by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). There’s lots of information on that page, but the real meat-and-bones of it is in the US City Average, All Urban Consumers table. Just trust me on that.

Ok, to use this table: Along the lefthandside, down in a column, is the years, stretching from as far back as 1913 (your grandpa / great-grandpa’s time) to March 07. (April will be up soon, they’re generally a month behind.) The columns to the right of the year column are individual months, all twelve of them, followed by an annual average. Doing individual month comparisons are generally more accurate than annual average. So to find the CPI for a given month, we find the row containing the year we want, and then find the column corresponding to the month we want, and Bingo! There it is. The CPI for that month.

For your own trivia, I’ll walk you through one of the top 10 listed. (Bear in mind, since we don’t have May 07′s CPI, this won’t be QUITE as accurate as it could be, but it should be pretty close!) Let’s do #10: Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.

Return of the King came out in December 2003. The CPI for that month was 184.3. The most recent CPI is March 2007, which is 205.352. So now we create a ratio of those two dates to get their CPI factor. (205.352 / 184.3 = 1.114053). Now, we multiply that factor times the raw (nominal) price from the past. (1.114053 x 34,450,834 = $38,380,060.97). So the Return of the King’s opening day ticket sales, in today’s dollars, is 4 million dollars more! That’s substantial!

Since I don’t expect you to do all the calculations, I’ll do them all here. (Since we don’t have May’s CPI – I’m estimating it at 208.72. The months previous have both increased approximately 1.7 each month. So two more months = +3.4)

Just because I’m a glut for punishment, here’s that table again, sorted:

Only three big differences, rank-wise. But then again, all of those movies are all from the past decade. I’ll leave you with this last comparison, for “all-time highest-grossing-movies”. Movieweb (with their annoying verizon ads) lists the top 1000 grossing movies of all time. At number 1 is “Titanic” (12/1997, $600,788,000), number 2 is “Star Wars IV: A New Hope” (5/1977, $460,988,000), and number 74 is “Gone with the Wind” ($198,655,000, 12/1939).

Doing the same thing again:

I rest my case.

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Tags: consumerism, economics, Math: now with more infinities!