Pick a year. This is the all-time domestic chart as of then— only films that had come out yet — priced in that year's dollars. The drop-down that went away.
1997
141 films we hold from 1997 or earlier
63 films areheld out of the ranking: their lifetime gross folds in decades of re-releases, so dividing by the release year's ticket price would invent tickets. They appear with a † below the ranked rows rather than being silently seated above Gone with the Wind.
Method.A gross is trapped in its own era's ticket prices, so to show it in 1997 dollars you divide by what a ticket cost the year it opened and multiply by what one cost in 1997 ($4.69, measured). That is the classic site's actual adjusted method, run to any year instead of only to today. Grosses are lifetime domestic, so a film that kept playing after 1997 carries its full run — the same reading the old chart gave. Films marked †are excluded from the ranking: their gross is a lifetime total folding in decades of re-releases, so it cannot be pinned to a single year's prices. Published figures fix those one film at a time, and we hold 147 of them.