After 77 days at the box office, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey has passed the $1 billion mark with a $1,001,134,992 take - approximately $300 million earned in the US and $700 million internationally.
Cue several "a haul as big as Smaug's!" gags around Weta HQ and yet another billion-buster from Peter Jackson, with An Unexpected Journey following in the hairy footsteps of 2003's Return Of The King, which took $1.119 billion throughout its run.
The current top fifteen all time worldwide box office takings goes like this:
Avatar (2009) - $2.78 billion
Titanic (1997) - $2.18 billion
The Avengers (2012) - $1.5 billion
Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows Part 2 (2011) - $1.32 billion
Transformers: Dark Of The Moon (2011) - $1.12 billion
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) - $1.119 billion
Skyfall (2012) - $1.108 billion
The Dark Knight Rises (2012) - $1.081 billion
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (2006) - $1.066 billion
Toy Story 3 (2010) - $1.063 billion
Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011) - $1.043 billion
Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999) - $1.027 billion
Alice In Wonderland (2010) - $1.024 billion
The Dark Knight (2008) - $1.004
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) - $1.001 billion
That means four of the fifteen-strong billion brigade hit cinemas last year, with Skyfall and The Dark Knight Rises' earnings even more impressive considering they had no 3D bump, unlike The Hobbit and The Avengers. Titanic and Avatar, meanwhile, with $2 billion plus each, seem pretty much untouchable.
Perhaps, with The Return Of The King the biggest earner of the original Lord Of The Rings trilogy, we can expect the same to be the case with the final part of The Hobbit, There and Back Again, now aiming for a December 2014 release.
As for The Hobbit: The Desolation Of Smaug, that’s still on course to land on December 13 this year. For what to expect from the next two Hobbitses filmses, check out our 10 Things You'll See In The Hobbit 2 And 3 feature - and for a good ol' fashioned chuckle, have a look at this Hobbit supercut below.
These figures mean nothing, when adjusted for inflation it turns out Howard the Duck took 3.6 billion dollars at the US box office alone. And that's an English billion (1,000,000,000,000) - not of that 100 million crap the yanks have made us use. More
I'll wait for the 5 hour long special edition blu ray, only then will I really be able to appreciate how much Peter Jackson can string out a thin storyline. More
How can a film, that people aren't exactly talking about, and has hardly got any buzz, break $1billion?! Shows you how much stupid money is in the global film business. More
13 out of 15 are franchises and, to my mind, only 5 of them are really that good. Makes you realize that a) The Oscars look pretty redundant when very few winners are this commercially successful and b) Hollywood only has itself to blame if really good movies don't do well. People tend to watch the movies that are advertised the most. All these top 15 had print campaigns that cost more than most movies' production budgets. More
@BelfastBoy I'm in the same boat, my friend. Harry Potter was turned down by every publisher and ended up being the biggest writing phenomenon of recent years. Agents and publishers only want to publish celeb rubbish to make money. It's not about quality. You're better off self-publishing, don't waste anymore of your life waiting on rejection letters. More
Posted by BenTramer at 13:13 on 04 March 2013 | Report This Post
This is totally random, but I'm a frustrated wannabe novelist who writes scifi. UK literary agents generally want stuff that has the potential to crossover into film or TV, yet very few are interested in reading scifi / fantasy proposals. Yet of the top 15 films listed above, practically all of them are in that genre, so clearly people like to watch that sort of thing! More
Posted by BelfastBoy at 12:53 on 04 March 2013 | Report This Post
