These days, it’s common for a big blockbuster to clear $1 billion at the worldwide box office. Now, that’s the standard turnover for a Marvel movie and billion-grossing efforts make up almost all of the top 50 highest-grossing films of all time. But it was once a rarity reserved for must-see movies like the final Harry Potter entry or the greatest Batman movie ever made.
No movie cleared this bar until 1997 when James Cameron came along with a little movie called Titanic and it wouldn’t become the norm for summer tentpoles to rake in this much money until the 2010s.
10 Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides ($1,045,713,802)
After a lackluster threequel, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise really started to lose the plot in its fourth installment. On Stranger Tides ditches virtually all connections to the past three movies, only keeping Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow long after the schtick had gotten old.
But enough fans still got a kick out of Depp’s performance to push the movie into the $1 billion club. The franchise wouldn’t underperform at the box office until the next movie, Dead Men Tell No Tales.
9 Transformers: Dark Of The Moon ($1,123,794,079)
Michael Bay was the perfect director to adapt action figures into a movie, because his “Bayhem” filmmaking style is the cinematic equivalent of a kid playing with toys.
Although it’s a marked improvement over its predecessor, Revenge of the Fallen, Dark of the Moon still falls into the same trappings of all Bay’s Transformers movies: loud, bombastic, offensive, and proudly unsubtle.
8 Alice In Wonderland ($1,025,467,110)
Before Jon Favreau’s The Jungle Book kickstarted a relentless barrage of live-action remakes of animated Disney classics, Tim Burton updated Alice in Wonderland with his own bleak, gothic visual style.
Like many of the Disney remakes that would follow, Alice in Wonderland is a visually stunning, but artistically vacant endeavor that fails to live up to its classic source material.
7 Pirates Of The Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest ($1,066,179,725)
When a movie based on a theme park ride defied the odds to become Disney’s next big franchise, the Mouse House couldn’t wait to rush out a sequel. Dead Man’s Chest relies on the supernatural elements more than its predecessor, but it’s still an action-packed spectacle.
As a big-budget adventure movie harking back to swashbuckler classics, Dead Man’s Chest recaptures more of the first movie’s magic than any of the subsequent sequels.
6 Avatar ($2,744,336,793)
Due to its use of a Pocahontas-esque story on a foreign planet populated with blue-skinned aliens, James Cameron’s Avatar was mockingly nicknamed “Dances with Smurfs.” Sure, the plot is derivative and the environmentalist message is on-the-nose, but that wasn’t the attraction of this movie.
The reason why Avatar became the highest-grossing movie of all time – a record it held until Avengers: Endgame came along – is that moviegoers were excited by its technological advancements. It was the most immersive, cutting-edge CGI ever created.
5 Titanic ($2,127,488,188)
James Cameron only promised 20th Century Fox a movie about the sinking of the Titanic because he wanted the studio to pay for him to explore the shipwreck. With a ballooning budget accommodating the construction of half a ship, many industry pundits expected Titanic to bomb, and the premise already provided them with a perfect metaphor to describe box office failure.
And then it hit theaters and became the first film in history to gross over $1 billion worldwide. It broke that record with such oomph that it almost made it to $2 billion, a bar it would later clear with subsequent re-releases.
4 Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows – Part 2 ($1,341,511,219)
Setting a trend that continues to affect book adaptations to this day, the producers of the Harry Potter franchise decided to split the final book, Deathly Hallows, into two movies. After getting all the exposition out of the way in the first part, the second could focus on the Battle of Hogwarts.
Eight years before Avengers: Endgame did the same thing, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 concluded a long-running franchise with an action-packed epic that feels like a hugely satisfying series finale.
3 The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King ($1,140,682,011)
Peter Jackson took a huge risk with The Lord of the Rings trilogy. There was no guarantee that this lofty, thought-provoking high fantasy epic would attract any moviegoers, and Jackson was shooting three big-budget movies back-to-back banking on their success.
Of course, as it turned out, the financiers had nothing to worry about. The Lord of the Rings movies were praised by critics as ranking among the greatest ever made. All three of them were box office hits and the third one, The Return of the King, became the second ever movie to gross over $1 billion worldwide.
2 The Dark Knight ($1,005,973,645)
After saving Bruce Wayne’s big-screen adventures from their post-Batman & Robin slump with the refreshing gritty realism of Batman Begins, Christopher Nolan really pushed the boat out for the sequel, The Dark Knight, arguably the Bat’s greatest on-screen outing to date.
Obviously, the star of the show here is Heath Ledger’s chilling Oscar-winning portrayal of the Joker, but the movie as a whole is a poignant post-9/11 noir about the fear of terrorism that happens to take place in Gotham City.
1 Toy Story 3 ($1,066,969,703)
In the summer of 2010, a decade after the franchise’s last installment, Toy Story 3 managed to pull in more money at the box office than its two predecessors combined. It was the first Pixar movie to gross over $1 billion.
Although its perfect ending was undermined by Toy Story 4 nine years later, Toy Story 3 provided fans of the franchise with plenty of closure in what was supposed to be the final chapter.