Which movie has sold the most amount of tickets?
Ask anyone what the highest-grossing movie of all time is, and you’ll likely get one of three answers: Avatar, Titanic, or one of the Avengers movies. If the person talking to you has nerd credentials, they’ll be able to specify it as the 2019 Avengers: Endgame. Where people may fail, though, is in the order in which the movies appear on the charts. For many years, Titanic seemed unassailable, and most cinephiles believed it would always be the biggest movie of all time. However, it has actually fallen to number four on the list, with both Avatar movies placing higher at number one and three, respectively. Avengers: Endgame slides in at a modest number two.
Here’s where things get extra interesting, though. You see, none of these three movies that made more money than Titanic actually sold more tickets than James Cameron’s era-defining disaster epic. Oh, and Titanic sold more than 300million fewer tickets than a movie most Hollywood audiences might not have even heard of.
Truthfully, on the surface, analysing box-office numbers is often not as revealing as people think, especially when comparing movies that were released decades apart. To put it as simply as possible, Titanic grossing a staggering $1.843billion in 1997—when average ticket prices in America were around five bucks—is a very different kettle of fish to Avengers: Endgame making $2.797b in 2019, when the average price was $9.16, and premium formats such as IMAX and 3D were also available at inflated costs.
Therefore, when analysed purely by the number of tickets sold, Titanic resoundingly trumps all three Hollywood pretenders to its throne. According to the movie statistics website Inside Kino, Titanic sold 389million tickets worldwide, while Avengers: Endgame was its closest competition at 351m sold. The first Avatar sold 331m in 2009, while Avatar: The Way of Water sold 253m in 2022. That’s a whopping 136m difference between ticket sales of Titanic and the Avatar sequel, yet The Way of Water grossed more money.
All this is to say, a whole hell of a lot of people paid their hard-earned money to see these films, but simply saying Titanic is now the fourth highest-grosser because ticket sales and inflation aren’t accounted for gives a false impression. However, it also makes the mind boggle at how many people paid for a ticket to the 1980’s Chinese opera film Legend of the White Snake. After all, it supposedly sold a mind-blowing 700million tickets.
Will it ever be beaten?
Considering Titanic is still the biggest-selling Hollywood movie ever made in terms of tickets, it would be highly, highly unlikely that anything will ever come along that outsells it by 311million. Hell, throw the ticket sales of Titanic and Avatar: The Way of Water together, and they’d still fall short of Legend of the White Snake by 58m.
These results simply speak to how enormous the Chinese movie market is. After all, Titanic isn’t even a close second to Legend of the White Snake. Instead, 12 other Chinese movies sold between 400million and 650m tickets between 1976 and 1984. The modern market is also still extremely strong. In 2025, the animated fantasy adventure Ne Zha 2 became the highest-grossing film worldwide, the fifth highest-grossing movie of all time, and a seller of 316m tickets.
