Top Ten Highest Grossing Movies: The Current Trends

In laymen terms, the highest grossing movies are those that have done impeccable business since the time they've been first released on the big screen for the broad audience. Their success is measured by the length of the time period they've been successfully viewed in the cinemas and more importantly by the amount of revenue generated by the films. While mostly a movie's performance is evaluated by how it does business in the theaters, there are certain other streams as well that contribute heavily to the revenue. Some of these other channels include entertainment through home video, rights to broadcasting on television and various merchandising.

We are going to look at ten of the highest grossing movies of all time in the Hollywood cinema while trying to find a recipe for inclusion in the top ten list. You should also note the fact, that all of these movies have grossed over a billion dollars and still earning. For reasons of inappropriate data collection of old films and inflation, only the most recent movies have been taken into consideration. If the revenue of Gone with the Wind is calculated with contemporary prices, it could easily take the top position with a safe earning of more than $3 billion. It has been the most successful film for up to 25 years after its initial release.

While evaluating the top scoring movies of the past fifteen years, the first position is secured by none other than Avatar, an epic science fiction American film; the movie directed, produced and written by James Cameron has done an enormous business of $2.7 billion. Surprisingly enough, following Avatar is again an epic movie created by James Cameron: Titanic. Records show that the film has done the astonishing $1.8 billion.

Moving on to the next spot, the movie taking the third position with $1.33 billion is the franchise film Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows: Part II. The next three movies following suit are Transformers: Dark of the Moon, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest – all doing business of approximately $1.1 billion and all of them being franchises too.

Animated movies have also managed to pull in a lot of fanatic viewers to the cinema for a long time now. With a dedication to quality and originality of the story, the animated films have done just as well on the box office as movies of serious nature and with live characters. So the seventh highest grossing film is none other than Toy Story 3, which has done $1.06 billion at the box office. The last three movies having a place in the top ten of the world’s highest grossing movies yet are Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Alice in Wonderland and The Dark Knight, each with a revenue slightly higher than a billion dollars.

By a survey of the records, it becomes evident that the franchise films are the ones, which have performed the best in worldwide cinemas. With the exception of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, it seems a film should be either a franchise's episode or a James Cameron movie in order to be on the top ten list. Generally speaking, franchise films are the movies that have been made into series. So to emphasize the power of franchises even further, some of the popular series that have not been mentioned in the countdown above are Star Wars, Spiderman and Superman. And there are numerous animated franchise series too that have reached great heights of fame, like Ice Age, Shrek and the recently re-released in 3D The Lion King.

The latter leads us to another notable trend. Despite all of the criticism (including ours) 3D movies receive, more than the half of the films among the top ten highest grossing movies are actually 3D films. Of course, this could be attributed to the higher prices for viewing movies in 3D but it is a trend worth mentioning and it explains why even blockbusters like Titanic and The Lion King have been recently re-released in 3D.

You are welcome to read our USA vs. Non-USA comparison of highest grossing movies of all time or just continue browsing our Review Maze.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon - Bigger, Louder, Messier

The new Transformers movie, a.k.a. Transformers 3, a.k.a. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, is everything you would expect from it: loud, colorful, stupid and pathetic. All that presented in glorious 3D. It is a big and relatively long movie with a lot of everything. And by being so exorbitant it transcends its stupidity and turns it into a statement.

The movie's massiveness leaks in every scene. It starts with a totally unnecessary and messy sequence showing the inception and execution of the Apollo flight to the Moon. This sequence mixes documentary shots with staged scenes and serves as an extremely boring introduction. All the more boring considering how it is all told in the trailers already. It really is about time summer blockbusters leave Kennedy docu shots to rest. They were only semi-interesting the first one hundred times. Transformers: Dark of the Moon also has Buzz Aldrin (the second guy on the Moon) playing himself. Ain't that grand?

This intro sequence is quite symptomatic cause randomness is all over the movie. One part due to the laughable script. Scenes and characters consistently lack motivation. Stuff happens for the sake of it. Scene after scene, the Autobots come to save the day (and our heroes) after the forementioned heroes have struggled for 20 minutes of screen time while the Autobots have seemingly been relaxing around in the meantime. Boy, these Autobots certainly have a thing for dramatic entrance. Speaking of the dramatic, Transformers: Dark of the Moon sports an excess of lame pathos.

There is a horde of wacky supporting characters. Apparently Bay liked John Turturro so much from the first two Transformers movies that he now has him and a whole bunch of other weirdos, played by Frances McDormand, John Malkovich, Alan Tudyk and Ken Jeong. Having such actors playing these random wacko roles is so self-indulgent in its pointlessness that it is impressive. It is almost like if Bay was looking for some kind of artistic credibility by casting them. Oh well, we surely don't mind and here go our congrats for their fat paychecks.

Continuing the excessiveness is the large cast of new transformers (mostly Decepticons). There are more of them and they all lack the slightest bit of personality. This is an inherited problem from the first two movies, but worth mentioning anyway. From the Autobots only Optimus and Bumblebee have any distinctive personality. There are, of course, a bunch of smaller transformers which are probably inspired by the more recent George Lucas' works. At least, they can successfully rival his creations in their annoyance.

One thing you can't accuse Bay of is the lack of style. His style may be too obvious, or insultingly straight to the point of being cringe-worthy, but it is still there. It is interesting how his trademark slow motion shots and fast action cuts mix with the 3D environment. Fast cuts and 3D don't mix well in general (the eye needs time to accommodate spatial changes). Bay has slowed down a bit in this department. Action is still fast cut, but not to the point of the previous movies. The filmmakers have also utilized both on-set 3D image capture and post-processed 3D (for the slow motion scenes, of which there are plenty).

Now for the good stuff: hand-to-hand mech combat can't go old (too bad there is not much of it); the new girl is not a worse actress than Megan Fox (which doesn't say much, indeed); depending on your attitude, you may find the wackos mentioned above mildly amusing.

In conclusion, Transformers 3 is a glorious mess. It is a huge and noisy flick that you may find occasionally interesting if you are willing to not grumble over the boring, annoying and insultingly stupid parts (which is most of the movie anyway). It will also keep you informed of the way Hollywood is going to. So, yeah, that's something.

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