Film · Box office
The Biggest Box Office Hits of All Time, Adjusted for Inflation
The headline list ranks films in the dollars of the day they were sold, which rewards whatever came out most recently. This one puts every film in 2025 US dollars. It gets updated whenever a new release changes the picture. Last updated October 7, 2026. The story behind it is in the article.
Adjusted for inflation
Adjusted to 2025 US dollars As reported
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Next in line: Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015), $2.69B (estimated); Avatar: The Way of Water (2022), $2.57B (estimated).
Every film on one chart
Oldest to newest. The gap between the lines is what inflation hides.
As the headlines report it
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Most box office per dollar of budget
Among every film on either list above.
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The best since 2000: Ne Zha 2, at 28x its budget.
How the numbers work
Adjusted figures for the top ten come from Guinness World Records' 2014 inflation-adjusted chart, which counts tickets sold, carried forward to 2025 US dollars with the IMF's consumer price index for advanced economies. Films that aren't on that chart are estimated with the same index and marked "est." Reported grosses come from Box Office Mojo and The Numbers; for films from the 1950s and 1960s, the reported figure is incomplete, so the gap between the two bars is bigger than it looks. Budgets are as reported, using the low end where a range is given. Box office gross is what theaters took in, not what the studio kept.