This Is the Biggest Box Office Hit of the 2000s

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published May 20, 7:55AM EDT

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This Is the Biggest Box Office Hit of the 2000s — © Courtesy of 20th Century Fox

Indie movies sometimes hit it big. The offbeat 1999 horror flick “The Blair Witch Project,” which cost less than $500,000 to produce and had a cast nobody had ever heard of, brought in $258 million. Two years earlier, “The Full Monty,” a wry look at working-class men in the north of England and their racy plan to make some money, had earned the same amount.

Films like these are the exception, though. Major production companies tend to prefer tried and true formulas to offbeat original projects that might make a buck but probably won’t. That’s why the top box office earners these days, the true blockbusters, tend to be sequels to previously successful properties (“Pirates of the Caribbean,” “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone”) or extensions of popular franchises like Star Wars or the seemingly endless storylines from the Marvel universe.

Also potentially very successful, to be fair, are animated features that often show some originality, like “Shrek,” “Cars” and “Finding Nemo.” As 24/7 Tempo discovered when we assembled this list of the finalists for the biggest box office hits of the 2000s, (comparatively) low-budget indies do sometimes surprise everyone and rake in major profits.

For example, number 43 on the list, “My Big Fat Greek Wedding,” produced by Tom Hanks with a budget of $5 million, realized $368 million worldwide. Way up in the number 11 position, controversial actor-director Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of Christ,” which cost $30 million to make, has the distinction of being the highest-grossing independent film of all time, with a box office of $622 million.
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“Avatar,” released in 2009, is the biggest box office hit of the 2000s. Its domestic box office was $760.5 million, ranking it at number four out of all movies in the database. The film starred Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldana, Sigourney Weaver and Michelle Rodriguez, and its director was James Cameron.

To identify the biggest box office hit of the 2000s, 24/7 Tempo reviewed box office data as of April 2021 from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by consulting firm Nash Information Services. Rankings are out of 4,230 movies for which data was available. Information on the cast and director(s) for each movie is from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), an online movie database owned by Amazon.

Click here to see all the biggest box office hits of the 2000s.
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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.