All-Time Top 232 Movies by U.S. Theatre Attendance

This chart lists movies ranked by the number of movie tickets sold in the United States1.

The data are computed by taking box office receipt data and dividing by ticket price. This is pretty much the only way to do it for United States and United Kingdom data (and is also the method used by Lumiere2).

No effort is made to compensate for population growth. It can be argued that a film had greater influence by impacting a greater percentage of all people, rather than whether it impacts a greater (absolute) number of people. However, the data I have for older films is greatly deficient, and a population-adjusted list would be even less useful (and more misleading) than the list shown here. Readers should have little trouble computing the ratios between the numbers here and suitable demographic data3.

I have attempted to account for the fact that for any given film, not all tickets cost the same. In particular, many movies are seen by a greater number of children, or are seen more often during matinees or with discounts ("passes" or frequent buyer tickets). Such movies sell more tickets per million dollars of box office receipts than other movies showing alongside them. There are also movies that cannot be seen by children or for which the distributor has prohibited the use of discounts. I try to adjust the position of individual films by accounting for these variations.

This has become a far greater issue in recent years with movies such as Avatar (2009) that are seen primarily in 3-D. A 3-D showing costs more money and there is no reliable and public source of data for the 3D-vs-2D market share of each picture, necessary to calculate precisely how much (on average per viewer) a viewer pays to see each particular film.

United States movie fans also need to be aware that being a top-grossing movie in the worldwide market is no longer sufficient to put that movie at the top of this chart. Using Avatar as an example again, it broke a record for worldwide sales (reaching $2.7 billion by the end of the 2010 summer, which would be equivalent to about 270 million tickets at U.S. prices), but the United States only comprised 28% of that amount ($760 million). Avatar made enough worldwide that it could have placed #1 on this chart, but only if that money had all been made in the United States!

Please read the section after the chart for the list of sources I used in my research, and a brief description of how the table was created. Also I want to point out that data is incomplete for movies before the 1960's.

Current and recently-showing movies are in bold; this includes re-releases and remakes of older films, including 3-D remakes. The studio abbreviations and notes are listed at the bottom.

To receive a rank number, a newly-released (2013) movie would have to gross at least $322.6 million at the box office.

Studios:

BV Buena Vista, Disney, Walt Disney, etc.

DW DreamWorks

Fox includes 20th Century Fox

MMax Miramax

NL New Line

Para Paramount

Sony

UA United Artists

Univ Universal

WB Warner Brothers

Notes:

AA: This film received an Academy Award® for Best Picture.

C: This film won a category-specific "best feature" Academy Award® (Best Animated Feature).

HA: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs received a Special Award (the equivalent of today's Academy Honorary Award) consisting of a full-size Oscar® statuette and seven miniature ones.

n: This film was nominated for an Academy Award® in the Best Picture category.

M: This film has been released more than once (or has been showing every year since its release, in the case of Rocky Horror); the admission total shown here is the total for all release years. In all such cases, the box office for each year was adjusted for inflation separately before adding the years together.

Method

In order to generate these figures (which are only estimates) I had to take many factors into account.

Box office gross figures are the easiest statistic to find. However, many movies have been released more than once and it is very important to find out how much the movie grossed in each different year, because the ticket prices differ from one year to the next. Also, for older movies the box office gross is itself an estimate, because exhibitors (theatres) and studios didn't really keep consistently accurate records on this type of thing until the 1970's.

Adjusted box-office gross figures come from Exhibitor Relations (see below) and account for changes in movie ticket prices (not the "consumer price index", which varies at a different rate).

Current and historical movie ticket prices are published by the Motion Picture Association of America (the MPAA) in their annual report (see below) but for years not mentioned in their report I had to derive estimated ticket prices from the adjusted and unadjusted box office gross figures. Note that these prices might seem low because they include subsequent runs, senior and child discounts, and special pricing.

MPAA ratings are available for movies that received a rating, a process that began around 1968. They are used to estimate child attendance ratios (children throw off the numbers because they pay less). For unrated movies a guess is made as to how much child attendance the movie would have gotten, using other more recent movies as a guide, and assuming that for older movies the audience was generally more balanced because of the lack of ratings and enforcement.

Sources for general information about movies were used to learn more about what movies attract what types of audiences, and to learn about movies whose studios have placed restrictions on discount ticket sales.

All of this information is used to compile a database of movies, each with an average ticket price index (which varies depending on the movie's audience demographics) and a total adjusted gross figure (which properly adjusts the grosses in each year the movie made money). Then, the attendance estimate is computed simply by dividing one by the other.

Future Improvements:

- Some data is lacking for years before 1960, and even more data is lacking for years before 1940.

- I want to find a comprehensive list of movies that have been released with restrictions on discount tickets. While many films restrict discounts during the first few weeks of release, a few restrict discounts during a much longer period.

- I am also in search of information that will help improve estimates of matinee attendance rates and attendance by seniors.

Things That Will (Probably) Never Change:

- Expanding the data to a global (worldwide) context. The problem here is that each nation (or group of nations, as might be the case in certain parts of Europe) has a greater interest in its own local statistics than in the non-local statistics. In other words, if I include movies that aren't popular in the United States, the list will be of less interest to readers in the United States. This list mainly exists for my own benefit, and since I never see movies outside the United States, I have no interest in a global list. I don't want to maintain multiple lists, one is hard enough!

Sources

This data was compiled from many sources, including the following. (I know some of the links are dead, but I cannot do anything about that.)

Sources of inflation data (I divide the adjusted gross by the actual gross to get an average ticket price index):

Mr. Showbiz box office receipts adjusted for inflation

The Movie Times' version of the same list (formerly here

The top 25 of the same list, from Washington Post, on digitallibrary.com

Box Office Report's list (was also here)

BOXOFFICE.COM's similar list

Box Office Mojo's list

Sources of average movie ticket price data:

A Google search for "average cinema ticket price 7.18 7.50 7.89 2011" (or similar, with more recent numbers) will yield re-published reports of the data released by MPAA.

MPAA's 2006 US Theatrical Market Statistics report

MPAA's 2001 economic review

MPAA's 2000 economic review

MPAA's 1999 economic review

MPAA's 1998 economic review

Lee's Movie Info Adjuster

Sources of MPAA ratings (used to estimate child attendance rates):

Amazon

Sources of old (unadjusted) box office receipts:

Infoplease top 100 all-time list (from Exhibitor Relations) (click on the "Movies and Videos" link to see some other related lists) This chart of historical yearly totals at Infoplease has ticket price figures since 1990

The AMUG list of $100 million movies

The Washington Post list of $100 million movies

The same list, on digitallibrary.com

Box Office Guru's box office archive

vex.net's box office archive

Sources of current box office receipts:

The Numbers: Box Office Data, Movie Stars, Idle Speculation

The Movie Times

Yahoo! Movies: Weekly U.S. box office actuals

IMDB's box office charts (follow the links under "US Box Office" in the left column)

Also of interest:

MPAA 2000 report on movie audience demographics

The Internet Movie Database

Industry periodicals (not on-line, but at the library):

Variety

Hollywood Reporter

Motion Picture Daily

Not used but possibly interesting:

The United States consumer price index data was not used, because the MPAA average movie ticket price data was more relevant.

Footnotes

1 : For those interested in data for countries other than the United States, here are some links:

Inside Kino has figures for almost all of Europe and Australia. (In German, but easy to navigate: Quartral = "season"; Woche = "week")

Lumiere presents a searchable database and actually gives data in the form of admissions! They have data for Europe and Quebec.

Paul Boschen's Aussie box office lists

2 : The Lumiere database describes their methods and limitations here. Of particular note is this paragraph referring to US and UK data:

Figures provided by the United Kingdom and United States refer to box office receipts rather than the number of tickets sold. In such cases, the number of admissions is estimated by dividing box office recipts by the average ticket price for the year concerned.

3 : See Wikipedia, Demographic history of the United States.

Other acknowledgments:

Some information contributed by: Rolf Polier.

Dead websites:

The Sci Fi Paradise box office list was at http://www.geocities.com/~scifi_paradise/Movies/boxoffice.html

ShowBizData switched to payment-only.

"Academy Award®" is a registered trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

This page was written in the "embarrassingly readable" markup language RHTF , and was last updated on 2020 Apr 03.

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