Almost everyone loved Skyfall. Critics and audiences alike were enthralled by the plot and characters, and the collaboration between Sam Mendes and Daniel Craig has been lauded. In many ways, therefore, it's no surprise that it has become the most successful Bond film of all time. Though this may be blasphemous to say, but Craig's Bond is just as dazzling as Sean Connery's. Proving its worth with enormous fiscal success, Skyfall has taken over £100m in British cinemas- the first film ever to do so, and has taken over $1b world wide.
The highest grossing film in the UK before Skyfall was Avatar, which had taken £94m in a year. But as the Guardian reports, it took just 40 days for Bond to surpass that number. As for the billion dollar mark, which sounds all the more impressive- it is in fact far more easily attained it seems. This year saw both The Avengers and The Dark Knight Rises smash through $1b of sales.
Sales numbers can be misleading, however, and levelling out numbers with inflation would certainly see many of the older Bond movies seem more successful. Numbers of tickets sold have in fact flagged largely from the hey-dey of the postwar era which saw an enormous boom in cinema, as it had become the medium by which to entertain troops and to keep up moral during the depression. No films have ever out sold Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1938), The Sound of Music (1965), or Gone With the Wind (1940), which sold 38 million, 30 million and 35 million tickets respectively. At the time, those numbers included almost two thirds of the population.
