Word: million
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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. 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. 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...
...Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, $402.1 million 2. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, $302 million 3. Up, $293 million 4. The Twilight Saga: New Moon, $284.6 million* 5. Avatar, $283.8 million* 6. The Hangover, $277.4 million 7. Star Trek, $256.7 million 8. The Blind Side, $209.1 million* 9. Monsters vs Aliens, $198.4 million 10. Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, $196.6 million (See what we learned from a decade at the movies...
Winners and Losers It happens - or was it inevitable? - that the top three winners were also the year's most expensive movies, costing between $210 million and $250 million, not including the cost of bringing them to market (usually another $100 million or so). Studio moguls are always looking for ways to tamp down runaway budgets, but they may have to acknowledge that money on the screen equals money in the bank often enough to take the risk. The worldwide popularity of these über-movies also suggests that smaller pictures will have a harder time getting made. That trend...
...which were the big losers? Expensive duds are harder to calibrate; for example, a film may disappoint Stateside and be a hit abroad. Still, it's a Hollywood rule that movies with $100 million-plus budgets should at least earn as much at the domestic box office as they cost to produce. If they didn't in 2009, they made our top-of-the-flops list. The underperforming nine: Terminator Salvation, Disney's A Christmas Carol, G.I. Joe, Angels & Demons, Watchmen, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Public Enemies, Land of the Lost and Where the Wild Things...
...generous: the sky's actually going to fall next year. Why? Because it's 2010, Mexico's bicentennial, and Mexican history has an eerie way of repeating itself. Mexico's 1910 centennial, after all, saw the start of the bloody, decade-long Mexican Revolution, which killed more than a million people. And that cataclysm was precisely a century after the start of Mexico's bloody, decade-long War of Independence...