I started ranking movies on the internet in February 2011.  My first movie subjects were all current actors and actresses and finding box office information was very easy….thank you Box Office Mojo.  As I grew an audience for my pages, I started getting requests for older actors. My mother-in-law requested a Clark Gable page.  At first I quickly dismissed this request….as I thought nobody would be interested in reading about somebody that passed away over 50 years ago.  That was mistake number one!  Turns out lots of people are interested in actors and actresses of yesteryear.  When I look at my Top 50 most popular pages….26 (or 52%) of them are classic performers!

So when I started researching Mr. Gable’s movie career I quickly discovered box office rentals.  Box office rentals are what a movie studio gets back from theaters not the movie’s box office grosses.  So since I think I am a pretty smart guy (mistake number two), I gathered up some of my old Variety magazines that listed box office rentals.  I created a Excel spreadsheet (mistake number three…the wife says always use Access) that listed the box office rentals from Variety and the actual box office grosses from Box Office Mojo.  Overall I found over 1,000 movies that had both rentals and grosses.  I did some math and found that on average….box office rentals were 44.18% of box office grosses…or a multiplier of 2.2.  The easy formula I came up with was:  Box office rentals (times)  2.2 = actual box office gross.  The next thing I realized was that with the exception of Gable’s Gone With The Wind, he did not have a movie with a domestic box office gross of over $11 million.  So to solve that problem I found out average movie ticket prices from 1912 to 2011.  Using ticket prices I was able to give each of Gable’s movies an adjusted box office gross.  Calculating adjusted box office grosses turned out to be a great way to compare how an old movie would have performed today (I got that part right!).

So feeling pretty good about my logic…I went to work.  Since 2011 I ranked almost 26,000 movies and have written over 300 movie pages on current and classic actors and actresses.  My movie pages have been quoted in newspapers, won some awards (3 time Hubbie winner…thank you thank you) and have opened some memorable communication lines with some of the movie subjects I have written about and their families. My pages have been read all over the world with over 5 million views.  Basically I have been running around singing Disney songs.

Recently I was researching the careers of Carole Lombard and Claudette Colbert.  I almost feel like a treasure hunter…only instead of gold or money…I am searching for box office numbers from the 1930s and 1940s.  My searches have taken me to some pretty cool places.  During my Lombard and Colbert search…I ended up in Australia of all places….as I found Australia’s Jonathan Derek Silver’s 600 page thesis on the movie business.  One of his tables of information showed film rentals as percentage of box office grosses with sources from Film Daily Yearbook and others.  On my second viewing of the table I realized that the percentage CHANGED every year…..and that they were not even close to the percentage I used in ALL of my calculations of box office grosses.

So after hitting the iceberg, I sent Thomas Andrews (he built the Titanic) down to assess the damage.  The good news is that almost 20,000 of the movies (movies from 1982 to 2016) in our database were shaken and scared but actually in pretty good shape.  The bad news?  All 5,619 classic adjusted box office grosses are WRONG!  When I was getting my multiplier I only used movies from 1980 to 1988 (that was my critical mistake) as the following table shows….the film rentals as percentage of box office grosses was constantly changing….and I picked the time frame that had the highest percentage…which ultimately severely short changed all of the classic movie’s adjusted box office.

The Following Table Shows Just How Wrong I Was

• Column 1 is the amount of tickets a movie sold in that year
• Column 2 is the wrong film rentals as percentage of box office grosses that I used
• Column 3 is the amount of movies in my database for that year
• Column 4 is the old number of movies with an adjusted $100 million or higher gross
• Column 5 is the old number of movies with an adjusted $200 million or higher gross
• Column 6 is the old average adjusted box office gross of all movies for that year
• Column 7 is the new film rentals as percentage of box office grosses that I will use
• Column 8 is the new number of movies with an adjusted $100 million or higher gross
• Column 9 is the new number of movies with an adjusted $200 million or higher gross
• Column 10 is the new average adjusted box office gross of all movies for that year