How much has Avatar (2009) made at the worldwide box office?

How to get close to this number

Anchor on the ceiling. Only a handful of films have ever passed two billion worldwide, and the all-time leader sits just under three. A record holder in this category is bounded by how many people can physically buy a cinema ticket, and that bound is around three billion dollars.

The re-release detail is the part that matters for how the record works: the film lost the title and then took it back after returning to cinemas. Box office records are cumulative and therefore gameable — a studio can reclaim a record by re-releasing, which makes the ranking a measure of distribution strategy as much as of popularity.

The inflation adjustment is the correction that reorders everything. Adjusted for inflation, a 1939 film would be well over four billion, because ticket prices have risen and cinema attendance per person has collapsed. Any nominal financial record spanning decades is a record about currency as much as about the thing it measures.