This weekend, the newest Star Wars movie will start playing in cinemas throughout the world. Pundits in places like Forbes and the International Business Times are already predicting it will be the “biggest movie of all time.”

The headlines and superlatives about this movie’s box office records will dominate entertainment news during the winter. However, it is important to understand that the hoopla surrounding box office records is nothing new: Hollywood uses special effects for both making movies and discussing how a movie does financially. Hollywood movies consistently break box office (ticket sales) records because the industry does not adjust sales for inflation.

Instead of recording the number of people who view a film, the movie industry records the amount of money taken in by ticket sales. Because both the general cost of living and ticket prices have increased substantially over time, movies that debuted years ago are unfairly compared with movies that debut today. A fair comparison of how movies have fared financially must include an inflation adjustment, which yields quite a few surprises.

The Force Awakens has already posted $14.1 million in opening day sales in a number of European nations, along with an estimated record $50 million from Thursday night previews in the US. It has already broken presale records in the United Kingdom, Russia, Canada and the US. Variety is estimating that the movie will reap $400 million (U.S.) in worldwide ticket sales between its mid-December opening and New Year’s Eve.

The table below shows the worldwide sales in millions of dollars that each of the six previous Star Wars movies earned.

The top-grossing movie is the 1999 Phantom Menace, which earned a bit over $1 billion. The lowest-grossing movie in the series is The Empire Strikes Back, which earned slightly more than half a billion dollars. The original movie, A New Hope, that started the franchise in 1977 only earned $750 million, ranking it in the middle of the pack among the six movies.

Best to worst Star Wars movies based on worldwide ticket sales (in millions of $US) Author’s calculations based data from Nash Information Services’ website

The above table, however, provides a rather distorted view of the six Star Wars movies because it is unfair to compare a movie’s box office take in 1977 with the box office take decades later.