Spider-Man: Brand New Day Didn’t Actually Beat Titanic in the US, New York Times Clarifies

The spark that triggered a New York Times editorial was the temptation to compare the box office totals of Spider-Man: Brand New Day with those of Titanic, effectively declaring a passing of Zendaya & Tom Holland over Kate Winslet & Leonardo DiCaprio: let’s not kid ourselves. It’s a curious situation, because we all know, even in our own wallets where purchasing power wanes, how inflation weighs on money as the years go by: often in cinema reporting absolute grosses are compared, producing mistaken records and inflated milestones the farther apart two films are in time. There would be a universal method to bypass the problem, but it would be less striking in effect.

Titanic vs. Spider-Man: Brand New Day, the New York Times invites considering attendance figures

How many tickets were issued for film X and film Y? This is a far more universal criterion for deciding which of the two feature films achieved greater success, sidestepping the inflation trap that skews another tempting comparison, especially when dollars are involved… but over a span of thirty years, as in the comparison between Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Titanic: the superhero film has worldwide receipts of about $2,410,000,000 (Box Office Mojo), while Titanic hovers around $2,265,000,000 when all subsequent rereleases are counted. The temptation would be to declare a symbolic overtaking, given how beloved James Cameron’s film remains, but that would be a colossal error: Titanic’s initial release began in 1997, and even its 2012 rerelease leaves us fourteen years apart! The New York Times invites reasoning, sticking to the most accessible data, namely US attendance: for Brand New Day, 75,000,000 tickets were sold, and for Titanic, a substantial 137,000,000. The gap is monstrous, completely concealed by the misleading plain box-office comparison. It is clear that the latter makes sense when discussed within the same release window or within a few years of each other (though inflation can still affect the short term). In our case, however, we paused before proclaiming Buen Camino as Checco Zalone’s highest-grossing film, remembering that Quo Vado? was a full decade earlier… and that decade.

Anyway, the New York Times has produced a small but interesting REAL ranking of the most-watched films in the USA, by ticket counts.

1. Gone with the Wind – 202,300,000
2. Star Wars – 178,100,000
3. The Sound of Music – 142,700,000
4. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial – 142,000,000
5. Titanic – 136,900,000
6. The Ten Commandments – 131,000,000
7. Jaws – 129,800,000
8. Doctor Zhivago – 124,100,000
9. The Exorcist – 110,600,000
10. Snow White and the Seven Daries – 109,000,000
11. Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens – 108,100,000