Disaster movies might not be great, but at least they’re original? Not really.
According to BoxOfficeMojo, movie sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots are your best bets if you want to make money, and don’t discount the market outside the U.S.
Looking at their list of the 100 top-grossing movies worldwide, only 24 are original stories. Marvel characters alone represent 20% of these films. Throw in the Lord of the Rings, DC Comics, Harry Potter, Fast and the Furious, Star Wars, and Transformers franchises and you’re more than halfway there.
The highest-grossing movies overwhelmingly earn the majority of their revenues outside the U.S. Oddly enough, of the 6 exceptions to this pattern, 2 are Star Wars movies (A New Hope and Rogue One). Perhaps Americans are more prone to repeat viewing in the theater, or maybe they like science-fiction movies more than people elsewhere.
The (over)reliance on retreads also holds true for disaster movies. Of the 6 total disaster films on the lists—Titanic (#3), Jurassic World (#6), Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom (#15), Jurassic Park (#40), Independence Day (#84), and 2012 (#92)—only the last 3 are “original” features.
Although Titanic arguably has edged out Pompeii over the years as the most common disaster depicted in film, we don’t really seem to get tired of the subject, do we? It might be one of those stories that needs to be reinterpreted for each new generation—this one focusing on class differences; that one, on miscommunication; this other one, on the crew, etc. Whatever the explanation, a worldwide gross of more than $2 billion for the last one is sure to give someone else the hope they can strike lightning, er, the iceberg again.
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Calvin says
2012 is way underappreciated in the mainstream, IMHO.