In the midst of the front-page New York Times news article about the death of actor and comedian Robin Williams comes this:
At an age when most actors are slowing down, Mr. Williams was engaged with a half-dozen recent and planned projects. They ranged from stage work and low-budget films to an anticipated — though still distant — big-budget sequel to his biggest hit, "Mrs. Doubtfire," which took in about $728 million worldwide in 1993, after accounting for inflation.
Box Office Mojo lists the worldwide lifetime gross of Mrs. Doubtfire at $441,286,195 and says the movie was released November 24, 1993. Some of that $441 million was surely earned not "in 1993," as the Times article puts it, but in the calendar years that followed. If the Times is going to adjust for inflation, it may want to clue its readers in on what technique it is using to convert the lifetime gross of a movie earned worldwide into a number of current U.S. dollars. Such a technique isn't so simple, which is why Box Office Mojo just uses nominal, non-inflation-adjusted dollars.
I can understand the impulse to adjust for inflation to make it easier to compare box office totals across years. But I fear that doing so winds up making the numbers be more about inflation than about the earning power of the movies.