On Thursday The Avengers passed the $400 million mark and, as promised some time ago, here are the top 10 fastest films to reach that number at the box office in North America, unadjusted for inflation.

Did you know The Avengers is only the 10th film to ever reach $400 million (in a single box office run)? So if you think about it for a second, this is the not just the top 10 fastest to $400 million, it’s the entire damn list. Now for those wondering, The Hunger Games sits at $388.5 million after 56 days and should pass $390 million by the end of the weekend. There is still a good chance that Katniss Everdeen will eventually make her way to $400 million.

10. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) – It took 74 days for this mess to reach $400.1 million, finishing with $402.1 million.

9. Star Wars: Episode 1 – The Phantom Menace (1999) – Only the 2nd film to ever pass the mark in a single theatrical run, The Phantom Menace needed 67 days to make $401.4 million, stopping at $431 million.

8. Spider-Man (2002) – Taking 66 days to reach $400 million, arguably one of the most popular superheroes of all time, Spider-Man ended its run with $403.7 million. This year’s reboot of the series, The Amazing Spider-Man, can only dream of such heights. But crazy things can happen, just look at The Avengers.

7. Titanic (1997) – The highest grossing film of all time for 12 years, Titanic hit $402.5 million in 66 days, closing its initial theatrical run with $600.7 million. Thanks to a 3D re-release back in April this year, the film now sits at $658.4 million.

6. Toy Story 3 (2010) – This animated masterpiece made it to $400 million in 58 days, running out of juice at $415 million.

5. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) – Johnny Depp, pirates, Jerry Bruckheimer, Legolas, Keira Knightley, and a huge Kraken were just some of the ingredients of this Disney blockbuster. It needed 45 days to reach $401.2 million and the film ran out of booty to plunder at $423.3 million.

4. Shrek 2 (2004) – While not exactly on the same level as Toy Story 3 quality-wise, it made a lot of money, and still the highest grossing animated film of all time. This one took 43 days to gross $400.9 million, totalling $441.2 million in the end.

3. Avatar (2009) – This little film made $415 million in 23 days and didn’t stop until $749.7 million during its initial run. Now Avatar, the current highest grossing film of all time (unadjusted for inflation), has made $760.5 million, a number you won’t see beaten for quite some time.

2. The Dark Knight (2008) – While Avatar made the most green, this film is the undisputed king of reaching milestones in record time. Unfortunately that statement is no longer true because there is a new champion in town. Regardless, The Dark Knight made $400 million in 18 days and with a total of $533.3 million it is still the #1 highest grossing superhero film of all time in North America, at least for two more weeks or so.

1. The Avengers (2012) – After an opening weekend of $207.4 million, this film was bound to break more than a few records during its box office run. So it was fastest to $100 million, $200 million, $300 million, and now $400 million in just 14 days. Right now not even the sky seems to be the limit for this superhero juggernaut, ready to win yet another weekend.

With more and more movies making epic amounts of money extremely fast, reaching $400 million is not as hard as it once was and there are definitely a few contenders on the horizon. No matter how you look at it, The Dark Knight Rises will make a lot money, very much guaranteed a top 5 on the chart above. Then there’s The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Avatar 2 (2015), Avengers 2 (?) which are all very likely to end up on this list in the years to come.

So besides The Avengers, what other film you see making over $500 million next?

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With Marvel bigger then ever, Superman and Batman back, superheroes were at their highest and surprisingly, they would not stop there, going above and beyond. Unfortunately there are certain steps that must be taken to actually manage to go above and beyond and, like every genre, the bigger they get, the more stinkers you have to shove to the side in order to get to the good stuff. Today we’ll do a bit of digging starting with My Super Ex-Girlfriend from 2006.

My Super Ex-Girlfriend was a comedy that tried to spoof the superhero genre, it wasn’t Elektra bad but it wasn’t good either. So it only made $22.5 million in North America and $60.9 million worldwide. Coincidence that Uma Thurman’s career took a nose dive after this with her only noteworthy appearance in the past 5 years being a very small role in Percy Jackson and the Olympians? I think not.

Next up is Zoom, a movie I had no idea even existed so I’m seriously scraping the bottom here. This came out in August 2006 starring Tim Allen and from the look of the poster it could be another The Incredibles rip-off… or not, I won’t bother looking more into it. Oh, almost forgot, $11.9 million in North America and $12.5 million worldwide (yes, it made only $0.5 million internationally).

Ghost Rider was the first superhero offering of 2007 and after opening with $45 million, it went on to gross $115.8 million in North America and $228.7 million worldwide. This had been a dream project of actor Nicholas Cage for years and from a financial point of view, it performed well enough but quality wise, the movie, well, it kind of sucked. There’s a sequel coming out next year, probably Sony thinking that people forgot the first one.

In May 2007 Spider-Man, the biggest player of them all back then, returned in Spider-Man 3, an overblown sequel that palled in comparison to the first two movies. What makes matters worse is previews made it look like the second coming and everyone was pumped, it was by far the most highly anticipated movie of 2007 and it showed just that opening weekend, scoring a record breaking $151.1 million. In North America it made $336.5 million, so a good deal less then previous entries but the 554.3 million it made internationally, made damn well sure that worldwide, this would become the new superhero box office standard with a whopping $890.7 million. What happened here was Raimi didn’t know if this would end up being his last Spider-Man flick or not, so he went all out, way all out, going overboard one to many times (emo Peter Parker is not something easily forgotten). What ended up as the highest grossing entry in the series would also bring the death of the Tobey Maguire-Sam Raimi Spider-Man in favor of a new take on the superhero, one very bold reboot slated for 2012 and simply called The Amazing Spider-Man. Naturally, this wasn’t a properly that Sony wanted to lose to Marvel anytime soon considering the Spider-Man movies were the top 3 highest grossing superhero flicks at the time.

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, opening in June 2007, was the sequel to the 2004 Fantastic Four. Everyone returned for this and it showed, as it was that same movie we got three years before, just with a bigger budget. While it did make a decent amount of cash, $131.9 million in North America (down from the first one) and $289 million worldwide (also down), it wasn’t worth it to Fox to risk money on a 3rd movie that could have made a lot less. That being said, neither of these flicks were particularly bad, just really really average and sustaining such a franchise for more then 2 entries is not an easy feat. In other words Fox cashed out on Fantastic Four before the eventual hitting of the bottom.

While Fox avoided the bottom, we won’t, because what comes next is Superhero Movie from March 2008, an abomination of epic proportions, on the same level as Elektra and Catwomen. This is the very definition of a BAD movie. This was so bad that it actually tried to spoof movies that were not even out at the time, talk about a lack of ideas. A superhero spoof done right could be comedy gold but this movie doesn’t even deserve the bottom of a latrine. $25.8 million in North America and $71.2 million worldwide makes me really sad knowing that much better movies made a lot less money.

So there’s a saying, if you’re down, you can only go up and with Iron Man, released just 2 months later, we went way up. This movie really blew it out of the park with fantastic reviews (94% on Rotten Tomatoes) and phenomenal success. With $318.4 million in North America and $585.1 million worldwide, this was the movie that started the best summer superheroes have ever had. Not just that, it also relaunched Robert Downey Jr.’s career and put Iron Man on the map, showing the world that it wasn’t just Spider-Man, Batman, Super-Man and X-Men out there. Now that I think about it, there sure is a lot of “MAN” on there. Iron Man was also the first 100% Marvel produced superhero flick, not bad at all for a first try.

Now what Marvel were gearing for with Iron Man was an epic superhero team-up based on The Avengers comics. For that movie to happen, they needed to first introduce the heroes that would be part of that story in their own movies and hopefully, those movies would become hits. They obviously succeeded  with Iron Man and Hulk was next. Now this wasn’t just any Hulk cause you see, back in 2003 we already had a Hulk that didn’t exactly set the world on fire and wasn’t particularly faithful to the comics either. So Marvel tried their luck with something different, a reboot called The Incredible Hulk. Now because this only features the origin story in a few clips during the intro of the movie, it might as well function as a sequel to the 2003 Hulk. Starring Edward Norton, The Incredible Hulk made $134.8 million in North America and $263.4 million worldwide, hardly the level of success Marvel were expecting from the character. Now because I live in the future (not really) I can tell you that in the end, Marvel went with another Hulk for The Avengers, so that makes it three Hulks in just 9 years, crazy, right?

Next part, well, it’s all been leading to this so I might as well get it out of the way, The Dark Knight and also a bunch of other great and not so great movies.

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7.

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This week we go over 9 movies from 2003 to 2005, 6 of which are based on Marvel properties, just to give you an idea how much they’ve grown since Blade in 1998. Among the 9 we get a bunch of sequels, a reboot, two utterly terrible spin-offs, one big red hero, one bigger green hero and an original animated flick from Pixar.

After hitting the jackpot with X-Men in 2000, sequel was the name of the game for Fox. Just three years later X2: X-Men United came out to even greater success, opening with $85.5 million (X-Men had $54.4M) and grossing $214.9 million in North America and $407.2 million worldwide. After making a good deal more money then the first one (something very very rare back then with superhero sequels) and receiving even better fan and critical reception, a 3rd entry was right around the corner. What could possibly go wrong, right?

In June that same year Universal took another stab at the superhero genre with Hulk. Directed by Ang Lee, it turned out to be a disappointment for fans and based on the $62.1 million opening, a missed opportunity money wise. With just $132.1 million in North America and $245.3 million worldwide on a $137 million budget (second most expensive superhero movie at the time), Universal were not happy and everyone blamed director Ang Lee. You see, he tried to make a very talky movie out of a very smashy property, that was his big mistake. Personally I blame Universal since they hired him and they should have kept an eye on the project.

There are very popular superheroes like Hulk, Batman, X-Men and so on and then there’s Hellboy, a Dark Horse comic hero unknown to many, at least until the movie came out in 2004. Released by Sony under the direction of Blade 2 director, Guillermo Del Toro, while not a huge hit ($99.3 million worldwide on a $66 million budget), Hellboy took on a cult following. Great DVD sales and rentals turned sequel talk from fantasy to reality.

Now we get to the reboot I was mentioning in the intro. I’m going to burst a few bubbles here, this ain’t the very long anticipated return of Batman, nope, you’ll have to wait a bit more for that cause in 2004 we had The Punisher. But why call it a reboot? Well you see, back in 1989 there was another The Punisher starring Dolph Lundgren that never made it into theaters in the US (hence why it wasn’t mentioned by me before). This new Punisher, while it got released on the big screen, wasn’t much to write home about. Having made only $54.7 million worldwide on a $33 million budget, Lionsgate decided to give the character a break until they could figure out where they’ll take him from there (sequel or another reboot).

On June 30th 2004, Spider-Man 2, the highly anticipated sequel of the arguably most popular superhero movie at the time, was released to glowing reviews eclipsing the first one. This became the new benchmark of the genre, loved by fans and even today considered among the best superhero movies ever to be brought to the big screen. Grossing $373.5 million in North America and $783.7 million worldwide, it became second only to Spider-Man ($403.7 and $821.7M) as the highest superhero money earner.

At this point DC Comics characters were out of the loop with Marvel dominating the field thanks to the likes of X-Men or Spidey. With the new Batman reboot in production, Warner decided to prepare audiences with a spin-off centered around catwomen. The name of the movie was, well, Catwomen and it bombed big time. On a budget of $100 million, it only made $40 million in North America and $82 million worldwide.

So far we’ve seen how popular established characters can become if done right, but how about an original animated superhero movie done by the masters of animation themselves. Yep, I’m talking about The Incredibles, a fantastic movie on itself that so happened to be animated and feature superheroes. It became the 3rd highest grossing in the genre with a stunning $261.4 million in North America and $631.4 million worldwide. So Disney and Pixar, how much longer do we have to wait for that Incredibles sequel, aye?

With the exception of the better forgotten Catwomen, 2004 featured a stellar lineup thanks to Hellboy, Spider-Man 2 and The Incredibles, unfortunately not everything that starts great has to end the same way. We just had to finish the year on a bad note thanks to New Line and their Blade: Trinity, a rushed sequel panned by critics and hatted by fans, not to mention it made the least amount of money out of the trilogy ($128.9 million worldwide), helped in no small part by a bad release window (December). This was more then enough to put the series on an indefinite hiatus. Recently there have been rumors of a 4th Blade movie, but we’ll see how likely that is over the upcoming months.

And last but not… hell, this is definitely also least, I’m talking about Elektra after all, the horrible horrible Daredevil spin-off. So bad that it makes Daredevil seem like a masterpiece. $24.4 million in North America and $56.6 million worldwide is what this made and I can’t shake the feeling it should have been a straight to DVD affair.

In Part 7 we explore the new beginning of a beloved character, one that would mark a new turning point for superhero movies. I’ll give you a hint, he has a thing for bats.

- Superheroes at the box office (Part 1)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 2)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 3)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 4)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 5)

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In Part 4 we lost Batman but got Blade, a second-rate superhero that showed Hollywood how a seriously taken source material and genuinely good movie can turn into a successful property, regardless of how famous it was to begin with. For the first time, you didn’t need Superman or Batman to make a hit.

So Blade turned a lot of heads in 1998 and gave 20th Century Fox the courage to finally shell out $75 million so that X-Men could start filming after years of delays (Bryan Singer signed on to direct the picture way back in 1996). Initially set to open in December 2000, X-Men was moved to July and considering filming just started in September, this was definitely on a very tight schedule. But before we go forward with X-Men, we still got 1999 and 2 superhero movies to talk about.

Black Mask was a movie made way back in 1996 that opened in North America on May 14th 1999 starring Jet Li. The only reason this finally got released is because Jet Li was starting to become popular thanks to his role in Lethal Weapon 4 just a year before. Black Mask only made $12.5 million. A few months later it was time for superhero comedy Mystery Men to bomb at the box office with $29.7 million in North America. Yep, 1999 was not a good year for heroes of the super kind.

X-Men opened on July 14th 2000 with the 5th highest opening weekend at the time, $54.4 million and outstanding reviews and praise from fans alike. This was everything Fox wanted it to be and the franchise potential was enormous. X-Men went on to gross $157.3 million in North America and $296.3 million worldwide. The Marvel revolution was here.

In November 2000 an original superhero created by the mind of M. Night Shyamalan was unleashed in Unbreakable. This was a very different take on the genre but it still received good reviews and great fan appreciation. $95 million in North America and $248.1 million worldwide made Unbreakable one of the bigger hits of that year.

2001 was almost empty with only 1993 Hong Kong movie, Iron Monkey, out in North America grossing just $14.7 million.

2002 was a landmark moment for the superhero genre with Blade returning and Spider-Man finally getting his big screen debut after years of going nowhere. Directed by the now famous Guillermo del Toro, Blade II opened March 22nd with $32.5 million and went on to make $82.3 million in North America and 155 million worldwide. At this point Wesley Snipes and Blade were here to stay, at least until New Line would pull a Superman 3 on it, but more about that at a later time.

Stuck in development hell for over two decades, Sony Pictures finally bought the Spider-Men movie license in 1999 along with a James Cameron original scriptment (he tried to get the project up way back in 1990). After considering directors like Roland Emmerich (Independence Day, 2012), Tim Burton (Batman, Batman Returns), Chris Columbus (Home Alone, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone) or David Fincher (Alien 3, Fight Club), they finally went with must less famous Sam Raimi (Evil Dead) in 2000, a long time fan of the comics. Filming took place from January to June 2001 and Spider-Men was set to open in February 2002. After previewing an unfinished version of the movie and realizing the huge potential they had with a summer release, Sony moved the date to May 3rd 2002.

May 3rd 2002, the date Spider-Man, arguably one of the big three most popular superheroes in the world (Batman and Superman being the others), finally opened and what an opening that was. $114.8 million, the biggest weekend ever at the time and it would not stop there. Spider-Man became the best reviewed superhero movie ever, considered by both fans and critics the finest flick to ever feature a superhero. Spidey went on to gross 403.7 million in North America (5th highest back then) and $821.7 million worldwide. Sony now had the biggest hero in town and they wanted to milk it to the last drop. A sequel was obviously on the way, but not for another 2 years, in the meantime other studios tried their luck at this hero thing, now more interesting then ever before.

Warner Bros, the studio that managed to ruin both Superman and Batman in little over a decades, released The Powerpuff Girls Movie in 2002. Based on the popular Cartoon Network series, it made $11.4 million. Hard at work on rebooting their then tarnished superheroes, Warner were not out of the game yet.

On February 14th 2003 Fox unleashed another Marvel superhero on the big screen, Daredevil starring Ben Affleck. It turned out a mediocre flick but it did gross 102.5 million in North America and $179.1 million worldwide. Instead of following it with a sequel, Fox were planning to release a spin-off 2 years later, a disaster we’ll talk about in Part 6.

- Superheroes at the box office (Part 1)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 2)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 3)
- Superheroes at the box office (Part 4)

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