I'd like to point out the difficultly of comparing eras. For example older films, say pre-VHS era often had multiple releases. When figuring the gross of Gone With the Wind or Star Wars it's difficult to say how much that gross is adjusted by inflation since it didn't just make money the year it was released. These movies often had release over many different decades. It's hard to pin down it's adjusted gross.

Also consider movies that play in two different years. In 2003 Return of the King was the top film of the year. That film came out in December. Do we adjust it's inflation-gross by 2003 or 2004. Boxofficemojo says tickets jumped .18 cents in 2004, but I doubt most theatre's changed right on 1/1/04. Do we factor all the gross based on 2003? Do find out how much it made in each year and factor it that way? Do we find out when theatres raised their ticket prices in 2004 and see if it affected ROTK?

Thirdly you have the case of reduced tickets prices for matinees, children and seniors. Spider-man 3 outgrossed Shrek 3 by 14million dollars in 2007. But you can bet a lot of those Shrek tickets where kids tickets and matinee adult tickets. Shrek 3 may well have out-drawn Spidey 3. So when comparing grosses are we just using avg. ticket price or should we also adjust for ticket price based on time of day and age of patron?

These examples are meant to demonstrate how imprecise inflation-adjusted grosses are.

Personally, I'd like a box office system that tracks tickets sold, not just dollar grosses. Sadly we don't have that and likely never will. For now Box Office grosses in dollars are all we have.

I don't know why people play to see a movie they think they are sure they will dislike, is it to go onto Twitter later and bitch about it? If I don't like the look of a movie I don't spend any money on it unless someone I trust says it is actually good.

I will be going into the movie expecting a big dump action movie based on a comic, on that premise (and having seen the 3 X-Men films), how can I be disappointed? And I too hope they make more movies based on the X-Men universe.

I've been following Steve Mason since before he came to this website and, while I like his commentary, one thing I've noticed is he really only cares about how much movies make in actual dollars. It is a terrible metric for saying how a movie stacks up against any others, besides those that came out in the past few years. But… if you go the Box Office Mojo website, click on the Box Office-All Time link on the left, then click on the Adjusted for Inflation link you should see the comparison you are hoping for, at least for the biggest movies of all time.