Your Top Box Office Earners Ever Worldwide

(Photo by ©Sony Pictures Releasing/©Marvel Entertainment)

[Updated: 2/24/2022]

While Avengers: Endgame and Avatar spent the last couple of years duking it out for bragging rights as the all-time highest-grossing movie, 2021 surprised everyone — to an extent — with the success of a certain friendly neighborhood wall-crawler. Despite continued audience ambivalence about returning to theaters, Spider-Man: No Way Home blew everyone away, setting new records and entertaining fans all over the world even as the COVID-19 pandemic continued to wreak havoc on the industry. It’s a far cry from 2019, when a total of nine films — including No Way Home’s predecessor, Spider-Man: Far From Home — cracked the top 50 and a whopping three movies — The Lion King, Frozen II, and the aforementioned Endgame — made it into the top 10. But it offered a glimmer of hope that things might actually eventually return to normal sooner rather than later.

With No Way Home landing at No. 6 and Disney’s absorption of what used to be 21st Century Fox, Disney now occupies seven of the 10 top box office rankings of all time worldwide (eight, if you count its joint ownership of Titanic with Paramount). But what does the future have in store? Both Marvel and DC/Warner Bros. have several films scheduled for release, including Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, which is likely a can’t-miss especially after the events of No Way Home, and Matt Reeves’ hotly anticipated The Batman. Then Universal is delivering the final chapter of its Jurassic World trilogy, which unites the new crew with the old, and Sony looks to follow up its Oscar-winning Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse with Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse – Part One. If any of them makes it onto this list, and we’re sure some of them will, we will update accordingly.

For the list below, we’ve included global box office performance, as well as domestic, and release date. We included dollars earned in re-releases, and in each of our descriptions, we look at where the film stood record-wise at the time of its run, and dive into things like critical and audience reception. We’ll be here to track the progress of new blockbusters and regularly update this list of top box office performers. So keep your eyes here, and check in with our weekly weekend box office wrap-ups.