My List of Box-Office Champs for 2012 Part I

Another year in film has ended, and throughout the month of January many publications and organizations have started coming up with their "best of" lists. Box-office related websites have published their list of winners and losers for the 2012, most prominent of which is arguably boxofficemojo.com. Familiar faces, like the Avengers and Batman, have shown up on that particular list.

As someone who has been obsessed, for reasons I can no longer remember, with box-office earnings of Hollywood movies since his early adolescence, I have thought of compiling my own list of box-office champions for the past year. It's easy to name the top-earners, or the movies that made a mint relative to their tiny budgets, but I want to look at things from a slightly different perspective. My calculations are not based on sheer grosses, or even necessarily return on investment, but on slightly different criteria which I will explain with each and every entry. I should qualify that I have not seen all of the films on my list, and therefore my personal assessment of their quality has nothing to do with their inclusion. So as not to go on forever, I've limited my list to five films.

From last to first, my big winners of 2012 are:

5. Les Miserables (Global box-office to date: $234,701,295)

I have yet to see this film, but it is on my list, first and foremost, for the sheer ambition of its makers. Its global receipts, in an era when there are over a dozen films that have grossed over a billion dollars, and in which most global blockbusters need to make at least twice as much money as Les Mis did to even just break even, do not tell the whole story here. While the movie's reported budget itself was a relatively frugal $61 million, its realization was a monumental task that took years and unbelievable amounts of chutzpah. Adapting a world-renowned stage musical into a feature film is no mean feat (just ask Joel Schumacher and Gerard Butler, whose cinematic take on The Phantom of the Opera in 2004 went out with a whimper, not a bang). From throwing together the production to assembling cast members who could actually sing (again, unlike Gerard Butler) and act the parts to marketing the film in order to ensure that the fans of the stage musical would show up on opening day, director Tom Hooper and his crew faced a monumental challenge, and for hurdling it I think they deserve a huge pat on the back.

4. Ted (Global box-office to date: $503,015,487)

Like Les Mis, this is a movie I haven't seen but it was another ballsy move from Universal Pictures (which also produced Les Mis) considering the strange subject matter (a foul-mouthed, sex-obsessed teddy bear). To anyone who would argue that Seth MacFarlane is a marketable brand name, I can only say this; not even Twentieth Century Fox, for whose TV studio his shows like Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show have made mucho dinero, wanted to get behind the project. Comedy is usually a good bet, and star Mark Wahlberg has proven bankable in the past, but considering the somewhat unique plot this was still a risk for the studio, and they deserve the success they've gotten for taking it.

3. Life of Pi (Global box-office to date: $451,349,806)

Like I said in my review of this film, Ang Lee, as a rule, does not make the same movie twice. What makes this career decision particularly striking is the fact that this movie, shot in 3-D for the considerable budget of $120 million, did not have the participation of a single known Hollywood actor. The lead actor, Suraj Sharma, was in fact a complete newcomer to movies, Hollywood or otherwise. Ang Lee's name attached to this movie was essentially its only selling point, and his highest grossing films prior to this were martial arts epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and the disappointing Hulk, neither of which managed to make more than $300 million at the global box office, but that did not stop Fox, a studio often alleged to be risk-averse, from gambling on an almost completely unknown cast of actors, and a story that mostly involved a young man interacting with a digital tiger. This film is Lee's biggest global box-office hit to date, and he and Twentieth Century Fox deserve the success they've reaped for daring to make this movie.


(To be continued)