15 Surprising Box Office Facts From 2014

Speaking frankly, I must confess that got into this whole writing-about-movies business specifically so I could spend my life avoiding things like mathematics and using my brain. But with 2014 winding down, I’ve been taking a look back at the year that was, and considering some of its ups and downs. ScreenCrush has already spent a lot of time on the creative highs and lows of the year, but what about the financial ones? Even if it meant doing some math, New Year’s Eve seemed like an appropriate moment to bust out my calculator and use it to make sense of the box-office numbers of 2014.

After several hours of study and long division, the staff came to the following list of surprising and strange box-office facts from the year. It’s important to note that all numbers and totals below are domestic unless otherwise noted. And it’s also important to reiterate that we’re terrible at math, and might have made a stray mistake here or there. But, barring that, here’s the most interesting stuff we learned about the movies of 2014, and the money they made (or, in a couple cases, didn’t make):

Surprising Box Office Facts From 2014

1. Only one movie made more than $1 billion worldwide in 2014: ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction’ ($1.08 billion). It topped its closest competition (‘Guardians of the Galaxy’) by some $315 million.

2. ‘Age of Extinction’ is also the most poorly-reviewed movie in the year-end box-office top-ten list—and the most poorly-reviewed movie in any year-end box-office top-ten list for the last 15 years. Its 18 percent on Rotten Tomatoes is the worst for any blockbuster since 1998’s ‘Godzilla’ (16 percent).

3. Movies in the 2014 box-office top ten that aren’t based on a comic book, toy, or previous movie: 0. The closest to an “original” movie in the top ten is ‘Maleficent,’ which is a reworked, live-action version of Disney’s animated film ‘Sleeping Beauty.’

4. The highest-grossing original movie of 2014 was ‘Interstellar’ ($178 million). The rest of top ten highest-grossing original movies of the year (meaning they weren’t spun off from or based on a previous movie, or concept from any other media): ‘Neighbors’ ($150.1 million), ‘Ride Along’ ($134.9 million), ‘Lucy’ ($126.6 million), ‘Non-Stop’ ($92.1 million) ‘Fury’ ($84.7 million), ‘Tammy’ ($84.5 million), ‘The Other Woman’ ($83.9 million), ‘Let’s Be Cops’ ($82.3 million), and ‘No Good Deed’ ($52.5 million).

5. That means there just ten original films among the top 55 grossing movies of 2014.

6. Of the top 25 earners of 2014, 11 were sequels (‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1,’ ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier,’ ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction,‘ ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,‘ ‘Dawn of the Planet of the Apes,‘ ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2,’ ‘22 Jump Street,’ ‘The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies,’ ‘How to Train Your Dragon 2,’ ‘Rio 2,’ and ‘300: Rise of an Empire.’)

7. The top-grossing horror movie of the year was ‘Annabelle’ ($84.2 million).

8. The top-grossing Sundance movie of the year was ‘Whiplash’ ($5.4 million).

9. ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past’ grossed $233.9 million, which means that by a margin of less than $1 million, ‘X-Men: The Last Stand’ is still somehow the top-grossing X-Men movie ($234.3 million).

10. ‘The November Man,’ a Pierce Brosnan spy thriller with a $15 million budget, made more ($25 million) than ‘Transcendence,’ a Johnny Depp techno-thriller with a $100 million budget ($23 million).

11. The single highest-grossing day of 2014 was November 21, when the top ten movies at the box office grossed $71.8 million, including ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1’’s $55.1 million.

12. The movie to appear in the most theaters in 2014 was ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2,’ which played on 4,324 screens nationwide. Despite this fact, it was the lowest grossing ‘Spider-Man’ movie to date ($202.8 million) and barely made more than half of the original Sam Raimi ‘Spider-Man’ ($403.7 million).

13. 2014’s two wide-release football movies, ‘When the Game Stands Tall’ and ‘Draft Day,’ earned nearly identical amounts of money ($30.1 million and $28.8 million), and sit adjacent to each other on the 2014 box-office chart, at #87 and 88, respectively.

14. The longest theatrical run of 2014 belonged to ‘The LEGO Movie,’ which spent a whopping 210 days in theaters. The only film that stands a chance to top it at this point is ‘Boyhood,’ which opened on July 11, is still playing in 25 theaters, and could ride its Oscar buzz for at least another month or two.

15. The Elizabeth Banks comedy ‘Walk of Shame’ is the lowest grossing studio movie of the year, with a total of just $59,209 total for Focus Features.