I watched The Dark Knight this past weekend and really enjoyed it. After reading a great review of the movie by Orson Scott Card I decided I would go and see it. I like just about every movie I see, so me telling you that it was a really great movie should really mean anything to you. To see how I felt about it, read Scott's review and just pretend I wrote it, because it is what I would have said if I could have said it that way. Did that make sense? Anyway, moving on. After watching The Dark Knight I was interested to see how much money the movie had brought in so far. I was both surprised and disappointed to see the it was at number 2 for the biggest box office of all-time in the United States. I was surprised because the movie has not been out that long and is already near the top. I was disappointed however, because Titanic was number 1 (that's probably because of all those teen age girls that went to see it again and again :) ). I was also pleased to see that Star Wars (1977) was number 3 on the list. (from imdb.com)

Rank	Title	USA Box Office
1.	Titanic (1997)	$600,779,824
2.	The Dark Knight (2008)	$491,702,478
3.	Star Wars (1977)	$460,935,665

The next things I noticed where the years when each movie had been released (1997, 2008, 1977). That was kind of a long time between each of these movies. Then the thought occurred to me, "But aren't these numbers based on ticket prices? Wouldn't a movie that made $460 million in 1977 have sold more tickets than the movie that grossed $491 million in 2008?" So I decided to find out. The data found at boxofficemojo.com shows the average price per movie ticket in the United States by the year. With this new found information I was able to estimate the total number of tickets sold for the top three grossing movies. By taking the total gross amount divided by the avg price per ticket I was able to estimate the total number of tickets that sold per movie ($gross / $ticket price = # tickets). Here are my results.

Title	Box Office Earnings	Avg Ticket Price	Total Tickets Sold
Titanic	$600,779,824	$4.59	130,888,850
Dark Knight	$490,600,141	$7.08	69,293,805
Star Wars	$460,935,665	$2.23	206,697,607

Do the math yourself. According to my calculations it is Star Wars (1977) that should be getting the praise for the number 1 movie of all-time, selling 75 million more tickets than it's closes competing movie. That is a big number. After coming up with these results I was even more disappointed. Now I know that Titanic beat out The Dark Knight by more then 61 million tickets sold, almost double. I think that this is a much better way to determine the popularity of a movie than trying to compare total earnings of movies done decades apart from one another.