I should have been more clear about the 8 Billion being for all of his movies. Harrison Ford is close with right about 7 Billion for 45 movies
I would say Gone With the Wind
And Paranormal Activity made $193,200,000 on a budget of $15,000 = 1,288,000% ROI or $12,880 per $1
Gotta love google!
I finally found a movie with a better ROI than "Paranormal Activity" - and it predates it by a few decades!
"Deep Throat" was made on a budget of $25,000 in 1972 and earned a total of $600,000,000 at the box office. It sounds hard to believe, but that's a quote from the documentary "Inside Deep Throat". The ROI is 2,400,000%. That's pretty freakin' mindboggling - and I'm not even sure if those numbers were even adjusted for inflation! If they were, that gross-income figure would probably be a lot higher. Then again, so would the cost of the production, so the actual ROI ratio wouldn't change...
But there is a caveat. The movie was financed with Mob money and much of the profits went to the Mob - reliable figures on the box office gross simply don't exist. One article in the LA Times argues that based on the average ticket cost, everyone in America would have to have seen it one-and-a-half times for such a figure to be true. However, this does neglect the fact that while the average movie ticket nationally between 1972 and 1980 went only from $2.06 to $2.69, porn theaters often charged a premium for their tickets, as much as double or more the cost of a regular movie ticket. But then you also have to factor in that in most of the cities it appeared, it was lucky to be on a single screen, never mind two or more, and over time it ended up banned in more than half the states in the country and many localities. It was eventually banned in New York City, where it premiered and was edited - the director lived in Queens. It was filmed in an assortment of locations throughout South Florida, including one residence in Coconut Grove, a Miami suburb.
Some estimates of the gross are as low as $40-50 million, while the mid-range estimate seems to be $300 million. If you included subsequent video sales, however, who knows how high that figure would go - going into the 1980s, porn theaters left and right were shutting down as more and more of the business was shifted to shooting straight to videotape and was either sold or rented to viewers for enjoyment in the privacy of their own homes, beyond the reach of the obscenity laws that got it banned from theaters.
While it's true that in 1985, the average VCR was about $600 and still considered a luxury, pornography made up an estimated 30-50% of the available movies at the time as well. In fact, it was porn that drove not only the sale of VCRs, but also their replacement, the DVD player. Blu-Ray never got that level of "penetration" by the porn industry for a few simple reasons: they were more expensive to create, didn't improve the quality much of movies shot cheaply on videotape in the first place, and by that point in the development of video entertainment, Internet downloads and streams were pegged to replace the DVD rather than Blu-Ray discs, at least in terms of the presentation of porn. Not only could you watch it from the privacy of your home, you could buy it there as well, and the mailman (or your kids) never see the suspicious plain brown boxes showing up in the mail from video companies they (hopefully) never heard of!
The Blu-Ray vs. download "war" isn't as hot as the VHS vs. Beta format war, or Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD, but I'd wager you probably watch more movies outside a movie theater from an Internet connection than you do from a shiny, plastic high-def disc.
