What Will Be the Top Box Office Moves of 2014?

I'm interested in other people's guesses on this. My predictions:

- Mockingjay: Part 1 will be the top-grossing movie of the year domestically. Catching Fire was tops for 2013 at $418 so far, narrowly beating out Iron Man 3, and there's nothing at the box office level of Iron Man for it to compete with this year. It will also be even better than Catching Fire (which is itself considered better than The Hunger Games), leaving behind the games and the arena for the start of a genuine revolution. This is by far the movie I'm most looking forward to in 2014. I don't think it will be tops internationally, though, and I'd be pleasantly surprised if it broke the $1 billion mark.

- The Hobbit trilogy has been disappointing people, with the second one making substantially less than the first. It will gain something from being the last installment, and may beat out Mockingjay internationally due to this, but at the domestic level I'd still expect something in the $300-million range (Part 1 made ~$300 mil, Part 2 made ~$250 mil) - not even the Lord of the Rings films, which were much better-liked, reached the $400-million mark.

- Of the comic book movies, Amazing Spider-Man 2 will do the best, with at least $800 mil. internationally and $300 million or more domestically. Now that the franchise is past repeating the origin story and can focus a whole film on its own story, it's guaranteed to, at minimum, outpace ASM (which made ~$750 million internationally). And the trailers look very promising. On average, Spider-Man is pretty much equal with Iron Man as the strongest comic book movie franchise out there, so there's no way this won't be the top comic book movie of the year.

- Captain America: The Winter Solider will be in the $500-something million range internationally and the $200-something million range domestically. That would put its domestic gross above Marvel's non-Iron Man films so far, but its international gross below Thor 2. The major international-gross films seem to be extremely special-effects heavy ones (probably because explosions don't get lost in translation the way dialogue can), plus Cap is the kind of figure who's likely to have more appeal to Americans than to the rest of the world.

- X-Men: Days of Future Past will either rejuvenate the franchise or be a major flop. On the "flop" side, Fox hasn't been doing well financially with its X-Men films recently, particularly at the domestic level (each successive film since The Last Stand has made less than its predecessor). Between the number of big-name actors and the level of special effects, this is very likely to be the most expensive X-Men film yet. People still don't entirely trust Fox to do a good job, ever since The Last Stand. If Fox manages to wreck a second of probably the two most popular X-Men stories of all time, it could kill the franchise altogether. On the other hand, if they really pull it off they could do better than any X-Men movie yet. Personally, I don't have high hopes.

- Guardians of the Galaxy will not match up to its recent MCU predecessors. The concept's very out-there, two of the main characters are CG (and one can only speak a single word), and they're less well-known among the general public than anyone Marvel's done yet (Thor at least had broad name recognition as a mythological figure, if not as a comic-book character). If this makes over $200 million domestically I'll be surprised. Quite willing to eat my words if I turn out to be wrong on this, though.

- Also, Godzilla will not do well - monster movies aren't generally big hits at the box office, as Pacific Rim (and previous attempts at Godzilla, and Cloverfield) showed.

What do you all think?

Lego Movie's looking good so far.

I think Maleficent has a pretty good chance of making a lot, if only because of Angelina Jolie.

That's kind of iffy. Disney's batting average with Live Action films lately have been pretty low. If Maleficent doesn't get good word of mouth, I don't see it doing much better than Oz: The Great and Powerful did.

If I had to make a complete dummy guess I'm going to go in this order with the grosses:

• The Hobbit: There and Back Again
• The Hunger Games: Catching Fire Part 1
• Transformers: Age of Extinction
• The Amazing Spider-Man 2
• Interstellar
• How to Train Your Dragon 2
• X-Men: Days of Future Past
• Captain America: Winter Soldier
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

edited 26th Jan '14 7:02:41 PM by Lionheart0

I'm not sure if it'll make any top of the year lists, but I'm sure Box Trolls will do well, based off of Coraline and Para Norman's success, for the month of September.

Godzilla will do well due to Brian Cranston being in it.

Bryan Cranston.