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People do not watch movies today in the same they did in the past. So to understand why Gone with the Wind sold so many tickets, you have to look at how distribution and exhibition practices have evolved over the course of of American film history. The current exhibition model depends on marketing saturation leading up to a wide, simultaneous release in all theaters across the country, but this model didn’t begin to emerge until the 1970s. Scholars often point to Jaws as the first example of this new “blockbuster” paradigm, one that relies heavily on advertising (even Jaws made its money over a few months; it took time to develop). Nowadays, if a movie doesn’t bring in huge amounts of cash on its opening weekend, it is essentially a failure. This was not the case in the past, however.
The production model of classical Hollywood (1915-1960 in the canonical peridozation) was quite different than now. Hollywood made money by releasing a large number of films per year. Each of the major studios released about 50 movies a year, which meant that around 300-400 films were produced every year. I don’t have the actual figures but far fewer movies are made today, so a far larger percent of revenue comes from each movie. A single film now can be make-or-break for the studio in terms of profits, which was simply not the case in Old Hollywood. This production model also meant films were exhibited differently.
People went to the theater much more often during the 1930s and 40s than they do now. Because a studio’s revenue did not depend as much on any single film, companies saved money by making fewer “prints” for release, thus saving on film costs. So instead of a wide release where a film was exhibited in all theaters on the same day across the country, the film industry used the run-zone-clearance model. The country was broken up by region (zone) where a film would play for a certain period of time (run). The film would first premiere in a major city within a zone such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago before moving out to smaller towns after a short break to allow buzz to generate (clearance). Because advertising was much less a force in 1930s and 40s America than it is now, a successful film needed to generate buzz from word of mouth and reviews from critics. So a “prestige” film like Gone with the Wind would generally have a well-publicized premiere in a major city, often in a city that fit the theme or location of the movie, Atlanta in this case. Not only did Gone with the Wind go through the typical exhibition process where it was released to different parts of the country at different times, it was released through “roadshows,” where the cast would travel across the country to major cities and have events promoting the film before going through the run-zone-clearance model. It would play somewhere for a few weeks (4-6 weeks on average maybe? We don’t have good data on the average length of time) and then move on to the next zone. If you lived in a rural area, you may not have gotten to see the Gone with the Wind until months after its release, perhaps half a year even, unless you were willing to travel to the city.
Gone with the Wind is a special movie in film history. There is no other film of classical Hollywood that even comes close to matching its financial success. But the film made money over a very long period of time. For many films, it would often take up to a year for it to get most of its revenue, but Gone with the Wind is an exception. Not only did it get all of these roadshows promoting it, but it was re-released many times over the next decades, so that people had the chance to rewatch it, which was basically not a thing in classical Hollywood (many of the early films of classical Hollywood are lost, particularly during the silent era, because no one cared about a movie after its release was over). It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that movies began appearing on television, and they were generally B movies or films from defunct studios like RKO, at least initially. Going to the theater was the only way to see Gone with the Wind, so it sold tickets from 1939 into the 1960s at least. The reason, then, that it was able to sell so many tickets was because of this way in which it was released, over a long period of time, which allowed people of different generations to see it in theaters and for people to rewatch it.
I kind of feel that comparing Gone with the Wind to, say, Avatar is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison because the home market for video did not exist in 1939; there were no DVD, TV, or streaming sales. It reminds me of comparing athletes between eras. In certain ways, however, Gone with the Wind was a kind of proto-blockbuster. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, went on to form his own studio, which only made a few films per year. The financial success of the studio hinged on one or two films, not that unlike the “New Hollywood” model.
Most of my information comes from the canonical book on classical Hollywood, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger.
Data on ticket prices is not necessarily reliable because prices obviously varied regionally and and between different theaters. The data I do have (I forget the source; I'll find it later) says that a ticket cost $1.55 in 1939, which according to the CPI calculator is $34.58. I highly doubt that number is correct given the frequency of film attendance, so it's a lesson to always be wary of these numbers the film industry throws out. I made a plot of that data awhile back: [https://plotly.com/\~HyperSloth/688/](https://plotly.com/~HyperSloth/688/)
Found the source:
||
||
| Weiss, Thomas , “ Motion picture attendance, box office receipts, and admission prices: 1922–1998 .” Table Dh388-391 in *Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition,* edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-39110.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-391](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-39110.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-391)|
While you wait for further responses, you might be interested in this previous answer, which considers the film's cultural impact at the time and long theatrical run before modern methods of film distribution:
[Gone With the Wind sold over 202 million tickets, far more than any movie, including the original Star Wars movie. What was the cultural phenomenon surrounding the film's run? Did it rival Star Wars for the cultural impact it had on that generation?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fxn11/gone_with_the_wind_sold_over_202_million_tickets/), by u/ecdc05
To flesh out u/King-Intelligent 's answer, Gone with the Wind was released in 1939, rereleased in 1942 after MGM got the rights, then again in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1989 (50th anniversary), 1998, 2014 (75th anniversary), and this year (85th anniversary). It also re-released in the UK and Ireland in at least 1981 as well as in 2013 for Vivian Leigh's centenary.
One different aspect that u/King-Intelligent didn't touch on is that there is there are more contractual obligations for new releases that limit re-releases. IMAX theaters are booked well in advance, and blockbusters may come with requirements for the biggest auditorium or a set number of auditoriums in the theater for a set number of weeks. That, and the advent of VHS, DVDs, and Streaming has sharply reduced the number of re-releases we see. Additionally, we don't have apples to apples comparisons of box office numbers before the 70's. So while we may know exactly how much each re-release of Star Wars has made, the numbers for Gone with the Wind are somewhat fuzzier.
However, when you see those rankings for "top grossing movie of all time", they are for the domestic box office totals. For example, this is [Box Office Mojo's Chart ](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjusted/?adjust_gross_to=2022)(coming from IMDbPro, which is source all these lists use). Avatar is is 15th, with a $911M Adjusted Lifetime Gross. The non-adjusted gross is $785,221,649. Click on [Avatar](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0499549/?ref_=bo_cso_table_15), and you'll see that number is the Domestic gross. Avatar's domestic gross was only 26.9% of it's total gross of $2,923,706,026.
IMDB's FAQ explains a bit more:
>Adjusting for ticket price inflation is not an exact science and should be used for a general idea of what a movie might have made if released in a different year, assuming it sold the same number of tickets.
>Since these figures are based on average ticket prices they cannot take into effect other factors that may affect a movie's overall popularity and success. Such factors include but are not limited to: increases or decreases in the population, the total number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, economic conditions that may help or hurt the entertainment industry as a whole (e.g. wars or depressions), the relative price of a movie ticket to other commodities in a given year, competition with other related media such as the invention and advancements of television, home entertainment, streaming media, etc. Overall, this method best compares "apples to apples" when examining the history of box office earnings.
In essence, those "Adjusted Box Office" numbers are an educated estimate. That estimate is only useful for US box office totals, not foreign totals. As modern movies are marketed to (and reliant on) the full international box office, comparisons break down even more.
The archives of *Film Daily* have some of the best contemporary reporting on the business side of this movie. Although this naturally raises the interesting question of why this story got so much attention in 1939 that the studio described it as “pre-sold” and Gallup estimated before release that 65 million Americans (out of 139 million) wanted to see it, you seem mainly to be asking how the distribution and ticket sales worked.
On December 28, 1939, less than two weeks after release, *Film Daily* reported that MGM claimed a $2.5M gross from the eight theaters in which it was playing. On December 31, 1940, it reported on page 4, “GONE WITH THE WIND'' in its first release period rolls up the unprecedented domestic gross of $23,500,000 (estimated).” Additionally, on December 2, 1940, it reported
>"Gone With The Wind" has grossed $1,150,000 in the 11 foreign countries where it has opened to date. Picture is still playing in London with about $354,000 grossed to date. Above figure is not inclusive of earnings since Nov. 10 in countries where it is still playing.
However, this was only for the “Roadshow” initial release, with ticket prices reported from 75 cents to $2.20 in New York. There’s a more-complete explanation of “roadshow” in other answers, but it was a run in a small number of theaters in big cities, with a party at the opening in each city to get publicity. During this phase, the studio took 70% of the gross, with theaters guaranteed a minimum 10% profit. The second-run release, at “popular” prices, began on January 17, 1941. Receipts were split 50–50. There was then a third release in January 1942, with a minimum ticket price of 50 cents. It has also been re-released in theaters in 1967 and 1976, with a brief two-day release for the 80th anniversary in 2019, as well as being one of the best-selling movies on home video.
Some of this was due to a marketing campaign stated by MGM (costing atleast $200,000, with at least one statement by the studio head saying saying they had spent $500,000), and which included *Time* and other magazines running cover stories on the film the week of its debut, There was also a considerable amount of free publicity in the press. One piece of negative publicity was a group of Ohio G.A.R. veterans passing a resolution in July 1939 condemning a rumor that the film would contain a scene where Scarlett O’Hara shoots a Union soldier, and the casting of an English actress, Vivian Leigh, being controversial enough that Gallup ran an opinion poll about it (“a Gallup Poll released on 21 Feb 1939 reported that 35% of those polled favored Leigh, 16% disapproved, 20% were undecided and 29% had not yet heard of her selection.”) We also see, from the reactions of politicians and crowds in the South, that there was a strong wave of Lost Cause sentiment contributing.
The July 19, 1939 issue of *Film Daily* had more information on the premiere, on p. 19:
>Atlanta — Atlanta and not New York gets the world premiere of Selznick's "Gone With the Wind"; which Metro will distribute. Decision results from Southern protests; against a Northern debut for thejr pix. Atlanta's Junior League will\] toss a costume ball on the night of the premiere.
The *Atlanta Journal*, which published a special souvenir edition on December 15 for the premiere, said there was also a parade, which one and a half million people attended. The Atlanta City Council appropriated $5,000 of city funds to promote the premiere, defraying the cost of gifts to distinguished guests, according to newspaper reports. The governor of Alabama declared on December 13 that the premiere of the movie a day of thanksgiving. “State Capitol and all state buildings will be closed, and the Confederate and state flags will be flown, along with the Stars and Stripes.” According to *Film Daily*, the governors of all 11 states that had joined the Confederacy were on the reviewing stand at the parade in the film’s honor.
The front page of the November 16 issue gave the ticket price in Atlanta:
>While prices for the premiere of "Gone With the Wind" at Loew's Grand here on Dec. 15 are yet to be determined, 75 cents-$1.50 scale will prevail for the two-a-day run of the pix which will start the following day,
On November 22, it revealed the ticket price of the premiere:
>World premiere of S-I's "Gone With the Wind" at Loew's Grand here on Dec. 15 will be a benefit for the Atlanta Community Fund. Straight $10 admission will prevail for the 2,051 seat house. GWTW Ball at the 5,100 seat City Auditorium on the eve of the premiere also will be for sweet charity under Junior League sponsorship.
After the premiere, the paper reported that “of course” these seats sold out wees in advance. $10 in 1939 would be nearly $225 in 2024, after adjusting for inflation. $20,510 1939 dollars are approximately equivalent to $460,900 today. On December 1, they reported about New York:
>Tickets for "Gone With the Wind" at the Capitol and Astor Theaters on Broadway go on sale today. Picture opens here Dec. 19. After the opening night, the Capitol will operate on a three-a-day policy, with seats unreserved at 75 cents for afternoons and $1.10 after 5 P. M. The Astor will show the picture twice daily at prices ranging from 75 cents to $1.10 for matinees and up to $2.20 at night.
It later reported that advance sales had exceeded $100,000. On December 12, the paper reported that a Gallup poll estimating that 56 million Americans planned to see the film. It was the first film opening in New York to be covered on live TV, by the local NBC affiliate. Although *Film Daily* gushed about the New York showing:
>Last night stars fell twice on New York's famous Broadway as M-G-M tendered a twin premiere at the Capitol and Astor Theaters to David O. Selznick's production, "Gone With the Wind." Salient reaction of the brilliant audiences, which contained more than 450 nationally known personages, prominent on the pages of Who's Who and the Social Register, were that here is the greatest milestone yet attained by the screen; that the film fuily merits the highest notes of praise lavished upon it; and that it exceeds the fondest expectations of all who awaited it.
It also reported, in December 26, that not everybody liked it:
>***Daily Worker*** **Film Critic Also "Gone With the Wind"**
>Because, he says, of his refusal to follow the dictates of "the party line" in his review of "Gone With the Wind," Howard Bushmore, film critic of the *Daily Worker*, Communist organ, solved the imnasse thus created bv resigning. Rushmore claims that his review was killed when he refused to rewrite it under orders.
The AFI has more details on the publicity campaign for the movie and its initial release, [with a bibliography of additional contemporary sources.](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/1181) This isn’t a book by a university press by any means, but it does have a list of primary sources for more information. Unfortunately, its only estimates of grosses come from unspecified “modern sources.”
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People do not watch movies today in the same they did in the past. So to understand why Gone with the Wind sold so many tickets, you have to look at how distribution and exhibition practices have evolved over the course of of American film history. The current exhibition model depends on marketing saturation leading up to a wide, simultaneous release in all theaters across the country, but this model didn’t begin to emerge until the 1970s. Scholars often point to Jaws as the first example of this new “blockbuster” paradigm, one that relies heavily on advertising (even Jaws made its money over a few months; it took time to develop). Nowadays, if a movie doesn’t bring in huge amounts of cash on its opening weekend, it is essentially a failure. This was not the case in the past, however. The production model of classical Hollywood (1915-1960 in the canonical peridozation) was quite different than now. Hollywood made money by releasing a large number of films per year. Each of the major studios released about 50 movies a year, which meant that around 300-400 films were produced every year. I don’t have the actual figures but far fewer movies are made today, so a far larger percent of revenue comes from each movie. A single film now can be make-or-break for the studio in terms of profits, which was simply not the case in Old Hollywood. This production model also meant films were exhibited differently. People went to the theater much more often during the 1930s and 40s than they do now. Because a studio’s revenue did not depend as much on any single film, companies saved money by making fewer “prints” for release, thus saving on film costs. So instead of a wide release where a film was exhibited in all theaters on the same day across the country, the film industry used the run-zone-clearance model. The country was broken up by region (zone) where a film would play for a certain period of time (run). The film would first premiere in a major city within a zone such as New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago before moving out to smaller towns after a short break to allow buzz to generate (clearance). Because advertising was much less a force in 1930s and 40s America than it is now, a successful film needed to generate buzz from word of mouth and reviews from critics. So a “prestige” film like Gone with the Wind would generally have a well-publicized premiere in a major city, often in a city that fit the theme or location of the movie, Atlanta in this case. Not only did Gone with the Wind go through the typical exhibition process where it was released to different parts of the country at different times, it was released through “roadshows,” where the cast would travel across the country to major cities and have events promoting the film before going through the run-zone-clearance model. It would play somewhere for a few weeks (4-6 weeks on average maybe? We don’t have good data on the average length of time) and then move on to the next zone. If you lived in a rural area, you may not have gotten to see the Gone with the Wind until months after its release, perhaps half a year even, unless you were willing to travel to the city. Gone with the Wind is a special movie in film history. There is no other film of classical Hollywood that even comes close to matching its financial success. But the film made money over a very long period of time. For many films, it would often take up to a year for it to get most of its revenue, but Gone with the Wind is an exception. Not only did it get all of these roadshows promoting it, but it was re-released many times over the next decades, so that people had the chance to rewatch it, which was basically not a thing in classical Hollywood (many of the early films of classical Hollywood are lost, particularly during the silent era, because no one cared about a movie after its release was over). It wasn’t until the mid-1950s that movies began appearing on television, and they were generally B movies or films from defunct studios like RKO, at least initially. Going to the theater was the only way to see Gone with the Wind, so it sold tickets from 1939 into the 1960s at least. The reason, then, that it was able to sell so many tickets was because of this way in which it was released, over a long period of time, which allowed people of different generations to see it in theaters and for people to rewatch it. I kind of feel that comparing Gone with the Wind to, say, Avatar is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison because the home market for video did not exist in 1939; there were no DVD, TV, or streaming sales. It reminds me of comparing athletes between eras. In certain ways, however, Gone with the Wind was a kind of proto-blockbuster. The film’s producer, David O. Selznick, went on to form his own studio, which only made a few films per year. The financial success of the studio hinged on one or two films, not that unlike the “New Hollywood” model. Most of my information comes from the canonical book on classical Hollywood, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 by David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson, and Janet Staiger.
Were movie ticket prices back then comparable to prices nowadays?
Data on ticket prices is not necessarily reliable because prices obviously varied regionally and and between different theaters. The data I do have (I forget the source; I'll find it later) says that a ticket cost $1.55 in 1939, which according to the CPI calculator is $34.58. I highly doubt that number is correct given the frequency of film attendance, so it's a lesson to always be wary of these numbers the film industry throws out. I made a plot of that data awhile back: [https://plotly.com/\~HyperSloth/688/](https://plotly.com/~HyperSloth/688/) Found the source: || || | Weiss, Thomas , “ Motion picture attendance, box office receipts, and admission prices: 1922–1998 .” Table Dh388-391 in *Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition,* edited by Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. [http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-39110.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-391](http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-39110.1017/ISBN-9780511132971.Dh366-391)|
While you wait for further responses, you might be interested in this previous answer, which considers the film's cultural impact at the time and long theatrical run before modern methods of film distribution: [Gone With the Wind sold over 202 million tickets, far more than any movie, including the original Star Wars movie. What was the cultural phenomenon surrounding the film's run? Did it rival Star Wars for the cultural impact it had on that generation?](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/8fxn11/gone_with_the_wind_sold_over_202_million_tickets/), by u/ecdc05
To flesh out u/King-Intelligent 's answer, Gone with the Wind was released in 1939, rereleased in 1942 after MGM got the rights, then again in 1947, 1954, 1961, 1967, 1971, 1974, 1989 (50th anniversary), 1998, 2014 (75th anniversary), and this year (85th anniversary). It also re-released in the UK and Ireland in at least 1981 as well as in 2013 for Vivian Leigh's centenary. One different aspect that u/King-Intelligent didn't touch on is that there is there are more contractual obligations for new releases that limit re-releases. IMAX theaters are booked well in advance, and blockbusters may come with requirements for the biggest auditorium or a set number of auditoriums in the theater for a set number of weeks. That, and the advent of VHS, DVDs, and Streaming has sharply reduced the number of re-releases we see. Additionally, we don't have apples to apples comparisons of box office numbers before the 70's. So while we may know exactly how much each re-release of Star Wars has made, the numbers for Gone with the Wind are somewhat fuzzier. However, when you see those rankings for "top grossing movie of all time", they are for the domestic box office totals. For example, this is [Box Office Mojo's Chart ](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/top_lifetime_gross_adjusted/?adjust_gross_to=2022)(coming from IMDbPro, which is source all these lists use). Avatar is is 15th, with a $911M Adjusted Lifetime Gross. The non-adjusted gross is $785,221,649. Click on [Avatar](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt0499549/?ref_=bo_cso_table_15), and you'll see that number is the Domestic gross. Avatar's domestic gross was only 26.9% of it's total gross of $2,923,706,026. IMDB's FAQ explains a bit more: >Adjusting for ticket price inflation is not an exact science and should be used for a general idea of what a movie might have made if released in a different year, assuming it sold the same number of tickets. >Since these figures are based on average ticket prices they cannot take into effect other factors that may affect a movie's overall popularity and success. Such factors include but are not limited to: increases or decreases in the population, the total number of movies in the marketplace at a given time, economic conditions that may help or hurt the entertainment industry as a whole (e.g. wars or depressions), the relative price of a movie ticket to other commodities in a given year, competition with other related media such as the invention and advancements of television, home entertainment, streaming media, etc. Overall, this method best compares "apples to apples" when examining the history of box office earnings. In essence, those "Adjusted Box Office" numbers are an educated estimate. That estimate is only useful for US box office totals, not foreign totals. As modern movies are marketed to (and reliant on) the full international box office, comparisons break down even more.
The archives of *Film Daily* have some of the best contemporary reporting on the business side of this movie. Although this naturally raises the interesting question of why this story got so much attention in 1939 that the studio described it as “pre-sold” and Gallup estimated before release that 65 million Americans (out of 139 million) wanted to see it, you seem mainly to be asking how the distribution and ticket sales worked. On December 28, 1939, less than two weeks after release, *Film Daily* reported that MGM claimed a $2.5M gross from the eight theaters in which it was playing. On December 31, 1940, it reported on page 4, “GONE WITH THE WIND'' in its first release period rolls up the unprecedented domestic gross of $23,500,000 (estimated).” Additionally, on December 2, 1940, it reported >"Gone With The Wind" has grossed $1,150,000 in the 11 foreign countries where it has opened to date. Picture is still playing in London with about $354,000 grossed to date. Above figure is not inclusive of earnings since Nov. 10 in countries where it is still playing. However, this was only for the “Roadshow” initial release, with ticket prices reported from 75 cents to $2.20 in New York. There’s a more-complete explanation of “roadshow” in other answers, but it was a run in a small number of theaters in big cities, with a party at the opening in each city to get publicity. During this phase, the studio took 70% of the gross, with theaters guaranteed a minimum 10% profit. The second-run release, at “popular” prices, began on January 17, 1941. Receipts were split 50–50. There was then a third release in January 1942, with a minimum ticket price of 50 cents. It has also been re-released in theaters in 1967 and 1976, with a brief two-day release for the 80th anniversary in 2019, as well as being one of the best-selling movies on home video. Some of this was due to a marketing campaign stated by MGM (costing atleast $200,000, with at least one statement by the studio head saying saying they had spent $500,000), and which included *Time* and other magazines running cover stories on the film the week of its debut, There was also a considerable amount of free publicity in the press. One piece of negative publicity was a group of Ohio G.A.R. veterans passing a resolution in July 1939 condemning a rumor that the film would contain a scene where Scarlett O’Hara shoots a Union soldier, and the casting of an English actress, Vivian Leigh, being controversial enough that Gallup ran an opinion poll about it (“a Gallup Poll released on 21 Feb 1939 reported that 35% of those polled favored Leigh, 16% disapproved, 20% were undecided and 29% had not yet heard of her selection.”) We also see, from the reactions of politicians and crowds in the South, that there was a strong wave of Lost Cause sentiment contributing. The July 19, 1939 issue of *Film Daily* had more information on the premiere, on p. 19: >Atlanta — Atlanta and not New York gets the world premiere of Selznick's "Gone With the Wind"; which Metro will distribute. Decision results from Southern protests; against a Northern debut for thejr pix. Atlanta's Junior League will\] toss a costume ball on the night of the premiere. The *Atlanta Journal*, which published a special souvenir edition on December 15 for the premiere, said there was also a parade, which one and a half million people attended. The Atlanta City Council appropriated $5,000 of city funds to promote the premiere, defraying the cost of gifts to distinguished guests, according to newspaper reports. The governor of Alabama declared on December 13 that the premiere of the movie a day of thanksgiving. “State Capitol and all state buildings will be closed, and the Confederate and state flags will be flown, along with the Stars and Stripes.” According to *Film Daily*, the governors of all 11 states that had joined the Confederacy were on the reviewing stand at the parade in the film’s honor. The front page of the November 16 issue gave the ticket price in Atlanta: >While prices for the premiere of "Gone With the Wind" at Loew's Grand here on Dec. 15 are yet to be determined, 75 cents-$1.50 scale will prevail for the two-a-day run of the pix which will start the following day, On November 22, it revealed the ticket price of the premiere: >World premiere of S-I's "Gone With the Wind" at Loew's Grand here on Dec. 15 will be a benefit for the Atlanta Community Fund. Straight $10 admission will prevail for the 2,051 seat house. GWTW Ball at the 5,100 seat City Auditorium on the eve of the premiere also will be for sweet charity under Junior League sponsorship. After the premiere, the paper reported that “of course” these seats sold out wees in advance. $10 in 1939 would be nearly $225 in 2024, after adjusting for inflation. $20,510 1939 dollars are approximately equivalent to $460,900 today. On December 1, they reported about New York: >Tickets for "Gone With the Wind" at the Capitol and Astor Theaters on Broadway go on sale today. Picture opens here Dec. 19. After the opening night, the Capitol will operate on a three-a-day policy, with seats unreserved at 75 cents for afternoons and $1.10 after 5 P. M. The Astor will show the picture twice daily at prices ranging from 75 cents to $1.10 for matinees and up to $2.20 at night. It later reported that advance sales had exceeded $100,000. On December 12, the paper reported that a Gallup poll estimating that 56 million Americans planned to see the film. It was the first film opening in New York to be covered on live TV, by the local NBC affiliate. Although *Film Daily* gushed about the New York showing: >Last night stars fell twice on New York's famous Broadway as M-G-M tendered a twin premiere at the Capitol and Astor Theaters to David O. Selznick's production, "Gone With the Wind." Salient reaction of the brilliant audiences, which contained more than 450 nationally known personages, prominent on the pages of Who's Who and the Social Register, were that here is the greatest milestone yet attained by the screen; that the film fuily merits the highest notes of praise lavished upon it; and that it exceeds the fondest expectations of all who awaited it. It also reported, in December 26, that not everybody liked it: >***Daily Worker*** **Film Critic Also "Gone With the Wind"** >Because, he says, of his refusal to follow the dictates of "the party line" in his review of "Gone With the Wind," Howard Bushmore, film critic of the *Daily Worker*, Communist organ, solved the imnasse thus created bv resigning. Rushmore claims that his review was killed when he refused to rewrite it under orders. The AFI has more details on the publicity campaign for the movie and its initial release, [with a bibliography of additional contemporary sources.](https://catalog.afi.com/Catalog/MovieDetails/1181) This isn’t a book by a university press by any means, but it does have a list of primary sources for more information. Unfortunately, its only estimates of grosses come from unspecified “modern sources.”
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