Yes, I know, it's a big deal.

James Cameron's "Avatar" made $1.85 billion in less than 40 days. That's about half of the entire economic output of Fiji from 2008 - in a little more than a month. Still, to borrow from Clark Gable's famous line, "Frankly, Mr. Cameron, I don't give a damn."

You see, while there has been a big hubbub this week over Cameron overtaking his own film as the top grossing film of all time ("Titanic," for those of you scoring at home), it's only part of the story. Sure, the total of $1.85 billion is higher than any other film ever made, but "Avatar" actually made less than a film that only raked in $400 million worldwide. (And I use "only" in relative terms here.)

Despite fevered claims of a new "top-grossing movie of all time," the 1939 classic "Gone with the Wind" still holds the top spot, despite the fact it only made a fourth of what Cameron's blue-skinned aliens did.

If that seemingly contradictory statement doesn't make sense, it's because you've forgotten that $1.85 billion doesn't go as far as it used to. Adjusted for inflation, the newest top grossing movie of all time doesn't even crack the top 25.

If you count tickets (which is the easiest way to counteract the $12 matinee), there's been 75 million tickets sold for "Avatar." The total is impressive unless stacked up against the estimated 202 million times someone said "One please" to see "Gone with the Wind."

If you consider that tickets for "Gone with the Wind" ran around 25 cents during its initial run, it's not hard to see why its total pales in comparison with the modern-day totals for "Avatar." Using today's ticket prices (an average domestic ticket price of $7.46, according to boxofficemojo.com), "Gone with the Wind" would've made just about $1.5 trillion - with a 'T.'

(How about this for even more buzz kill: more people bought tickets to the universally panned "Star Wars Episode 1" than have ponied up for "Avatar.")

While it's a fair point to take note of "Avatar" sinking "Titanic" (you really didn't think I was going to resist that pun, did you?), it's also worth noting that while Cameron has the two top grossing films of all time, "Titanic" and "Avatar" are sixth and twenty-sixth in terms of tickets sold.

Still, while we're bashing the achievements of "Avatar," let's not forget that more has changed since 1940 than just the spending power of a dollar. At the time Clark Gable was on the silver screen, having a television in your house was more than a decade off. There was no Internet, no DVD rentals, no Hulu or video games.

While today's movie goers have nearly limitless outlets competing for their attention (for one, there were about 110 million Web sites out there, at last estimate), radio was the only mass media competing with theaters in 1939. Today, if you turn off everyone's Internet access, cancel their Netflix subscription and let the cable go dark, you'd be surprised how many people would drag themselves to the local multiplex for a matinee. It's no surprise fewer people have gone to see "Avatar." Fewer people today go to the movies overall. (The movie's best year? Bet you didn't say 1946, when American theaters collected more than four billion tickets.)

That's not to say that I don't like "Avatar." I do. I've seen it twice and have browbeat several friends and relatives into seeing it. Because the biggest (and for some only) draw of this film is the spectacularly innovative new use of 3D, this is not a movie to rent, I've told them. (I didn't see it twice for the plot.)

In the end, it's the 3D that means more to me than tickets sold or dollars earned. The 3D movie has been around since the 1950s (it was initially developed as to try to counteract the exploding popularity of television), but none has used it quite the way Cameron has in "Avatar."

The experience goes beyond the gimmicks of 3D movies of old (and recent) and is breathtaking; it's been routinely suggested to possibly herald the future of movies. In that light, the movie that we should be comparing "Avatar" to isn't "Gone with the Wind." Rather, the better comparison is "The Jazz Singer," which came out in 1927 as the first feature-length motion picture with sound (yes, that will be on the final).

Though the film only really had two parts that featured sound that matched the action on screen, "The Jazz Singer" blew the doors off the nascent film industry. Theaters went from showing nothing but silent films in 1927 to silents making up less than one percent of all films being shown in 1933. In six years time, "The Jazz Singer" completely changed the face of films.

Forget how much money it made. Can "Avatar" stack up to that?

(If you're also annoyed at the number of quotation marks in this column, Brandon Szuminsky can be reached at bszuminsky@heraldstandard.com.)