By John C.

 

All box office numbers in this article are courtesy of Box Office Mojo, and representative of current worldwide grosses. Pictured to the right is one of the many brilliant posters in Disney’s “Not Since…” Best Picture campaign for Pixar’s Toy Story 3 – the highest grossing movie of the year.

 

I hope everyone had a good time celebrating the Holidays over this Christmas weekend, and many of you, I’m sure, used the time to catch up with a movie or two.  Well, the box office is in and judging by the numbers, the genuinely mediocre threequel Little Fockers was the most popular choice with a domestic gross of nearly $31 million.  This comes as no surprise, considering the success of the superior first two in 2000 and 2004.

 

But one of the nicest surprises of the weekend was that the Coen Brothers’ wonderfully entertaining western True Grit came in at second place with nearly $25 million domestic.  The movies of Joel & Ethan Coen – though almost always critically acclaimed, usually don’t get that sort of public box office attention.  Although they took home the top prize at the Oscars for their ultra-violent No Country For Old Men in 2007, True Grit seems to be the most accessible and mainstream of their work.

 

This weekend’s box office returns got me thinking about the rest of the year’s successes.  If you look at all of the highest grossing films for 2010, the top ten is entirely made up of ones that were either marketed towards families or had a preexisting fan base.  Inception ($825.4 million) was the one exception at number 4, but Christopher Nolan’s trippy dream world thriller would arguably have not been a hit were it not for the success of The Dark Knight two years earlier.

 

The fourth installment in Dreamworks Animation’s popular franchise, Shrek Forever After ($739.8 million), came in at number 5, and part 1 of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows ($831.2 million) took the third place spot.  Number 2 was the surprise breakout hit of Tim Burton’s excellent 3D reimagining of Alice in Wonderland ($1,024.3 billion), which took off like a shot after it was released by Disney last March.

 

It is very gratifying to see that Toy Story 3 is the highest grossing movie of the year with $1,063.1 billion.  Disney chairman Rich Ross obviously hopes that the film’s popularity amongst audiences and critics alike can translate into a Best Picture win at the Oscars – the first ever for an animated film.  The problem is, in this day and age box office success doesn’t necessarily bring home the gold.  Like last year when the financial flop of The Hurt Locker beat out the monster success that was Avatar.

 

December has also seen the healthy success of several films initially only available in limited release, including the excellent ballet thriller Black Swan and masterful Oscar frontrunner The King’s Speech, showing that positive box office returns are no longer limited to big budget productions.  In a lot of cases it seems that audiences have used their dollars to display a good taste in movies, but on weekend’s like this one it’s mediocrity like Little Fockers that brings in the most money.