What hath inflation wrought? Variety reports today that Illumination’s wholly unnecessary Grinch reboot has now crushed a 29-year-old holiday movie record, surpassing Home Alone’s box-office total to become the most successful Christmas movie of all time. Yes, The Grinch. Yeah, the Benedict Cumberbatch one. No, we don’t entirely get it, either.
Those numbers do become slightly less depressing if you take the forces of inflation into account; Home Alone’s $476.7 million in 1990 becomes $919.2 in the modern day, nearly cresting the vaunted billion-dollar mark. Meanwhile, a rising tide presumably lifts even the Grinchiest of boats, with rising ticket prices and the general uptick in box office numbers—with 2018 as the biggest year for American ticket sales to date—helping Scott Mosier and Yarrow Cheney’s animated comedy cruise past the $500 million point, the sixth of Illumination’s Minion-heavy CGI efforts to hit the benchmark. It was also the third-most-successful animated movie of the year, beaten only by Incredibles 2 and Hotel Transylvania 3, and easily trouncing Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse, which is actually its own special flavor of infuriating.