Nikki Finke agreeably posts that The Dark Knight is hitting the $1 billion mark in worldwide receipts. This is an entirely meaningless benchmark in the world of Inflated Hollywood Play Money™.

On Box Office Mojo’s all-time corrected-for-inflation chart for domestic releases, the film—whose box office has been endlessly bloviated about this year—appears not in the top five, ten or even twenty, but rests at 27, below such forgotten blockbusters-of-their day as Grease and Thunderball.

The impact of rising ticket prices are harder to assess in worldwide charts, but they are skewed even more by the changing efficiencies of timed global releases. On that chart, Dark Knight currently resides at number three, but a cursory look finds at least ten more films whose worldwide box office probably surpasses it. But box office stories are a lot less interesting when the news comes down to, “Well, it’s about as big as The Sixth Sense.”