Avengers addendum!

Box Office Mojo is usually a day or so behind, and often a bit more with takings outside of the US. But in any event, it has now caught up as far as last Friday - showing The Avengers now going ahead of The Dark Knight in raw dollars grossed in the US (making it number # 3, measured in that way, behind Avatar and Titanic). And it has now also passed Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in worldwide box-office gross (making it number # 3, again behind Avatar and Titanic).

In inflation-adjusted terms, it is still somewhat behind The Dark Knight in the US domestic market, but will (I'm confident) eventually overtake it. It will not overtake such classics as Gone with the Wind (1939), Star Wars (1977), and Sound of Music (1965), and will probably settle in the end into somewhere in the mid to high 20s on the list of all-time US grosses, adjusted for inflation. Perhaps it will end up in about the same territory as such huge successes of their time as Mary Poppins (1964), Thunderball (1965) and Grease (1978).

But that puts it in impressive company. It's actually very difficult (for me, at least) to compare the performances of movies from different generations. You can adjust for inflation, at least within a particular market, but there are many other imponderables to make fair comparisons difficult. Some of those imponderables give advantages to earlier movies.  Still, one way or another, we can say that The Avengers is turning out to be one of the most commercially successful movies of all time.

And as a further addendum, I will slightly tweak the heading of the previous post in case anyone reading it quickly thinks I'll no longer be blogging at all!