The biggest earners in the archive

Some of the answers were among the biggest films ever made, the kind that broke records on the way out of cinemas and held them for years. Here they are, by number, with the records they set.

#0042, from 1997, held the record as the highest-earning film ever made for twelve years, until the same director beat himself with another one. James Cameron wrote and directed it, spent more on it than any film before, and set a fictional romance against the real disaster it is built around. A three-hour period piece was widely expected to flop. Instead it became the first film to take more than a billion dollars worldwide, sat at number one for well over a decade, and swept the Oscars with eleven wins on top, matching the all-time record. That combination of money and prizes is most of why people still argue about it.

#0015, from 2015, was the revival of a dormant space franchise after a ten-year gap, directed by J. J. Abrams. It reached a billion dollars faster than any film before it, twelve days from release, and it is still the highest-grossing film ever at the North American box office, ahead of everything that has come since. Critics were mostly kind to it for bringing the series back to the feel of the originals, even as some noticed how closely its plot tracked the first film of all. If the year lines up with a very famous return, trust the instinct and guess big.

#0047, from 2023, is the odd one on this list, because nothing about it looks like a blockbuster. It is a three-hour, dialogue-heavy biographical drama about a physicist, rated for adults, and it still grossed close to a billion dollars, by a wide margin the highest-earning film ever made about a real scientist. It also took seven Oscars, including Best Picture, which almost never happens to a film that earns this much. It opened the same weekend as a very different comedy, and the contrast between the two turned both into events and sent both to enormous numbers.

#0029, from 1994, set a record of a different kind. For years it was the highest-grossing traditionally animated film ever made, and the highest-earning film of its year anywhere in the world. Hand-drawn animation almost never competes with live-action spectacle on money, which is part of why that record stood as long as it did. The stage version that grew out of it went on to become the highest-grossing theatrical production ever staged.

Big earners make for a particular kind of puzzle. The box-office clue, usually a helpful nudge, becomes a giveaway once the number is large enough, so these tend to fall earlier than most. Half the skill is noticing when a figure is doing the work for you.