This Is the Biggest Box Office Hit Since 2000

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated May 7, 9:07AM EDT · Published May 7, 8:05AM EDT

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This Is the Biggest Box Office Hit Since 2000 — © Courtesy of Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures

If you want to produce a top-grossing film nowadays, make it animated and about superheroes, wizards, vampires and pirates doing battle in the dystopian future, in Middle Earth and in a galaxy far, far away. That would seem to be a winning combination of ingredients, in any case, if you look at the 100 biggest box office hits since 2000.

The roster of top box office earners over the past two decades is dominated by animated films, superhero flicks and sequel-churning movie franchises such as Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Lord of the Rings, Star Wars and various corners of the Marvel cinematic universe.

Spending money to make money is a big part of the recipe for success. Big-budget blockbusters obviously rule the day, as only three of the top 100 films had production budgets lower than $50 million. More than three-quarters of the movies on the list cost at least $100 million.

24/7 Tempo has compiled a list of the top 100 domestic box office hit films of the 21st century thus far. From the list, it picked the biggest. Information on production budget, domestic and worldwide gross, and domestic box office was sourced from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. When unavailable from that source, domestic box office figures were taken from IMDb, an online movie database owned by Amazon, or from Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator. Casting information comes from IMDb.
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The biggest box office hit since 2000 is “Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens.” This 2015 film had a domestic box office total of $936.7 million. Its production budget was $306.0 million. It stars Daisy Ridley, John Boyega and Oscar Isaac.

Click here to see all the biggest box office hits since 2000.
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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.