Highest-grossing film at the global box office (inflation-adjusted)

Rising cinema ticket prices mean the all-time top-grossing movies are nearly all recent films. Although Gone with the Wind (USA 1939) took just US$393.4 million (then £88 million) at the international box office, in an inflation-adjusted list it comes top with a total gross of $3.44 billion.

The total was worked out by estimating the total number of tickets sold for a film and multiplying it by the average U.S. ticket price for the current year.

The highest grossing film at the global box office is James Cameron's 2009 science fiction spectacle Avatar, which has generated a total of $2,923,706,026 (£2,410,657,016) from worldwide ticket sales.

It would be wrong, however, to call Avatar the biggest film of all time. The cost of cinema tickets rises with inflation, which means that a film released now will make far more money in absolute terms than a similarly successful film from decades past.

The highest grossing film at the global box office, when adjusted for inflation, is not Avatar, or indeed any of the big-budget superhero movies of the last 10 years, it is the 1939 historical epic Gone with the Wind.

Over the course of its first three theatrical runs (which lasted from December 1939 to November 1943), Gone with the Wind sold approximately 202 million tickets in the US alone. For context, there were only 130 million people living in the US at the time, meaning that not only was the film seen by effectively the entire theater-going public, but that millions of people went back again and again. (Which is particularly impressive considering that the film is 3 hours 44 minutes long!)

Including its worldwide box-office numbers and those of its various theatrical re-releases (of which there have been many), Gone with the Wind is estimated to have earned an inflation-adjusted box-office gross of $4.5 billion.

The origins of Gone with the Wind

Atlanta, Georgia-born author Margaret Hamilton published the novel Gone with the Wind in 1936. The 1,030-page historical romance tells the story of southern plantation owner's daughter, Scarlett O'Hara, and her tumultuous relationships with potential suitors Rhett Butler and Ashley Wilkes. The story takes place against the backdrop of the American Civil War and the declining fortunes of the South's slave-owning upper class.

The book was a bestseller, shifting an estimated 100,000 copies over several reprints between 1936 and 1938. It also received widespread critical acclaim, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Hollywood producer David O. Selznick won the bidding war to adapt this cultural phenomenon in early 1937, believing it had the potential to be his masterpiece and the greatest film ever made.

Getting the project off the ground

Gone with the Wind's production was troubled from the start. Just the process of casting the leads, for example, took more than a year. Selznick and the film's original director, George Cukor, spent an estimated $92,000 ($2 million) shooting test footage of the potential cast, using up 162,000 feet of film stock.

The script was also a massive undertaking. As mentioned above, Mitchell's novel was more than a thousand pages long and told a story that many Hollywood insiders believed could never be adapted for the screen. Playwright Sidney Howard produced the first draft of the script, but Selznick – who had misgivings about Howard's work – brought in numerous other writers to attempt rewrites and revisions, often discarding their work as well.

Eventually, however, the project began to take a definite shape. The lead (and last part to be cast) was Vivien Leigh as Scarlett O'Hara, with Clark Gable as the romantic scoundrel Rhett Butler. The principal cast was completed by Hattie McDaniel as Scarlett's enslaved maid "Mammy", Olivia de Havilland as Scarlett's cousin and love rival Melanie Hamilton, and Leslie Howard as Scarlett's first love interest Ashley Wilkes.

A troubled production

Selznick's plan for Gone with the Wind was a bit of what he called "Hollywood insanity" – a project so massive and so expensive that it would have to be the most successful film of all time, or else everyone involved would go bankrupt. He secured $1.25 million from MGM and planned to invest another $1.25 million from his own company's funds.

When production eventually started, on 10 December 1939, it was with the largest, most ambitious scene in the film. Every single set on the Selznick studio backlot was dressed up with painted facades to make the place look like civil-war-era Atlanta, Georgia. Every Technicolor camera then available (there were seven) was hired by the production, and then the whole backlot was set on fire.

This set the tone for rest of the production, which would blow through its original budget and schedule only a month or two into filming. Everything about the film was done on a massive scale, including a small town's worth of sets (made using around 1,500 tonnes of lumber), 5,500 costumes (at a cost of $153,818 – now $3.4 million), more than 2,400 extras and some 1,500 horses and farm animals. Just the laundry costs during production ran to $10,000 (equivalent to around $230,000 today).

Adding to the production problems was Selznick's overbearing management style. His perfectionism and interference in day-to-day operations drove away the scriptwriter, Sidney Howard, and the original director, George Cukor, as well as several other key members of the cast and crew. Cukor was replaced by Victor Fleming, who was having to divide his time between Gone with the Wind and his other ongoing project, The Wizard of Oz.

Counting the cost

Principal photography wrapped on 1 July 1939, and the arduous process of editing the film began. A total of 449,512 feet of film had been shot, which works out to more than 80 hours of raw footage. The final cut of the movie was 3 hours 42 mins long, and used 22,300 ft of film, meaning that the film that ended up on the cutting room floor would extend most of the way from New York to Philadelphia.

In the end, the cost of the production ran to $4,250,000 (now $96.7 m), almost double the original plan, and that figure doesn't include all the costs associated with printing, distribution and marketing. It is estimated that the final price-tag, including all the post-production work, probably reached something like $7 million (equivalent to $152 million today).

David Selznick had put his company deep into the red, and ran up enormous personal debts backing Gone with the Wind. Around the time of release, he wrote to a friend about the film, "I have staked everything on it, including my personal future and the future of my company".

Release and Critical acclaim

Given the popularity of its source material, and the constant drip of stories about the production in the press, the hype surrounding its premiere was immense. The big night was scheduled for 15 December 1939 at the Grand Theater in Atlanta, Georgia, which was dressed up in facade that imitated the O'Hara plantation of the film.

While the cast picked out their red carpet outfits, and the executives congratulated themselves on what seemed to be a surefire hit, Selznick was still worrying and obsessing over every detail. In the days before the premiere, for example, he was badgering staff with late-night memos such as "BE VERY CAREFUL OF THE PAPER YOU SELECT FOR THE PROGRAM [STOP] SOMETIMES THEIR CRACKLING NOISE MAKES IT DIFFICULT TO HEAR THE DIALOGUE [STOP] PROMISE YOU WILL ATTEND TO THIS".

Despite his worries, the critics were awestruck and no-one complained about rustling programmes. Although their opinions of the film's story and writing were mixed, all were united in their praise of the cast's performances and agreed that the sheer scale and spectacle made the film essential viewing.

At the Academy awards on 29 February 1940, Gone with the Wind secured a total of eight Oscars (plus two honorary technical awards). These included Best Picture, Best Director (Victor Fleming) Best Actor and Actress (Clark Cable and Vivien Leigh) and the first oscar win by a Black actor (Hattie McDaniel, who beat co-star Olivia de Havilland to win Best Supporting Actress).

Box Office Success

Anticipating massive public demand, MGM decided to forego mainstream distribution channels and send the film out as a "roadshow release". This meant limited runs at cinemas all around the country that were operated by MGM directly and open to advance bookings only. Tickets for one of these roadshow screenings cost more than double the standard price for a cinema ticket.

To give a sense of the film's success even with this limited release, consider the example of the Grand Theater in Atlanta, where its premiere had been held. A 10-week-long roadshow engagement in the spring of 1940 generated a box-office gross of $250,000 (now $5.6 million) from just this one cinema.

The film did not go on general release until the following year, by which time MGM and Selznick had already made their investment back with interest. The general release proved to be so popular that it continued to run until November 1943.

Gone with the Wind would be re-released in cinemas with wide distribution again in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1989 and finally in 1998. The massive popularity of the 1960s re-releases (which coincided with the centennial of the US Civil War and the events depicted in the film) were such that the decades-old film was one of the highest-grossing movies of the 1960s.

The Legacy of Gone with the Wind

Today it seems that the film’s status as a perennial favourite is finally beginning to wane. The film’s racial politics, which passed unnoticed by most audiences in the 1940s, are now difficult to ignore or excuse away. Streaming services have started placing notifications or introductions explaining the film’s historical context and the political purposes that its “Lost Cause” narrative supported.

It's hard to imagine any subsequent film managing to break this record, as the media landscape has changed so much since the 1930s. Back then, in the “Golden Age of Hollywood”, a film like Gone with the Wind could be the undisputed biggest cultural event of the year – it did not have to compete with TV, streaming services, or videogames for the public’s attention.

Still, it’s never wise to say that a record will never be broken.