Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, $196.6 million (See what we learned from a decade at the movies.) The Twilight Saga: New Moon, $284.6 million*ġ0. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, $302 millionĤ. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, $402.1 millionĢ. 31, and an asterisk denoting those pictures still playing in theaters:ġ. Here are the top 10 films released in 2009, with the tally ending Dec. Ticket prices keep rising and with Avatar charging road-show fees and getting away with it, look for Hollywood to keep following the Starbucks model: persuade the customers that your product is premium, and charge them for the privilege of buying it. Inflation explains the variance between dollars earned and tickets sold. The number of tickets sold, 1.474 billion, was the highest of the past five years though lower than sales in any year from 2001 to 2004, when the big franchises ( Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, Spider-Man, Shrek, Harry Potter) were really cooking. For the first time ever, the annual box-office total exceeded $10 billion ($10.5851, to get into pi calculations), outpacing the previous record, in 2008, by nearly 10%. No matter what else Americans skimped on when they got slammed by the Great Recession, they didn't stop going to the movies. This may not have been the time to expand the Oscar category for Best Picture from five films to 10, but studio bosses will say it was a very good year.
#2010 highest grossing movies movie#
But in 2009's cosmic economic battle of extraterrestrials the Autobots and Decepticons of the Michael Bay movie and the Pandorans of Cameron's the blue people will soon triumph. It has already passed the billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office ( Transformers 2 topped out at $800 million), quickly becoming the fourth highest-grossing all-timer after the second Pirates of the Caribbean film, the final Lord of the Rings installment and, at the top, a little love story called Titanic. Then, as if not just in response but rebuttal to this mass-produced entertainment, came Avatar, the James Cameron sci-fi spectacular that has earned $350 million in its first 2½ weeks and, in about the same time, should overtake the Transformers sequel.
In the early summer, Transformers 2 steamrollered all competition on its way to becoming only the ninth movie in history to earn $400 million at the domestic box office. That sentence will self-destruct some time this month. Despicable Me (Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud) - $22.Follow the North American box office, the top-grossing movie released in 2009 was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.
Sex and the City 2 (Michael Patrick King) - $23.5Mġ0. Shrek Forever After (Mike Mitchell) - $27.5Mĩ. The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (David Slade) - $34.2Mħ. Alice in Wonderland (Tim Burton) - $37.6MĦ. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I (David Yates) - $38.9MĤ. The biggest Australian film of the year was Tomorrow, When the War Began, which took in $13 million locally.ģ. The total box office for the year finished at $1.128 billion, an increase of 4 per cent from 2009 when Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince took first place.ĭisney-Pixar’s hit Toy Story 3 was the top-grossing film actually released in 2010, ahead of the penultimate wizarding adventure Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part I, Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland and Christopher Nolan’s Inception.
The sci-fi epic - which amassed more than $100 million in domestic total - was one of six 3D titles in the top 10, proving the format to be highly successful for the studios. James Cameron’s Avatar, released in December of 2009, has emerged as the highest-grossing film at Australian cinemas for 2010, according to figures released by the Motion Picture Distributors Association of Australia today.