Films based on comics generated over $4.6 billion in box office revenue worldwide this year, according to numbers compiled by ICv2 from data from Box Office Mojo for a presentation at the recent DICON Conference in Seoul, South Korea. That's up substantially from 2013, when ten comic-based movies generated roughly $3.7 billion.
This year, there have been ten movies based on comics, including four movies based on Marvel characters in the top six movies worldwide.
Guardians of the Galaxy is the #2 film worldwide of 2014, behind only Transformers: Age of Extinction, and films based on Marvel characters also hold the #4, #5, and #6 slots.
Two of those films, Guardians of the Galaxy and Captain America: The Winter Soldier, were produced by Marvel Studios, and the other two were produced under license by other studios, X-Men: Days of Future Past by Fox and the Amazing Spider-Man #2 by Sony.
There were six more movies based on comics in 2014, only one of them grossed less than $200 million worldwide.
In addition to the four Marvel films mentioned above, Disney Animation also released Big Hero 6, loosely based on Marvel comics characters but not in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a property now owned by Viacom, originated in a black and white comic self-published by its creators in the 80s.
Two films, Noah and Hercules, were based on comic stories created as part of the film development process.
And two films, 300: Rise of an Empire and Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, are based on properties created and owned by Frank Miller.
Sin City: A Dame to Kill For was the only comic-based film that was not in the top 30 films worldwide.
The comic-based films in 2014, with their worldwide box office gross as of December 1:
#2. Guardians of the Galaxy, $771.5 million
#4. X-Men: Days of Future Past, $746.0 million
#5. Captain America: The Winter Soldier, $714.1 million
#6. Amazing Spider-Man 2, $709.0 million
#13. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, $477.2 million
#17. Noah, $362.6 million
#21. 300: Rise of an Empire, $331.1 million
#27. Hercules, $243.4 million
#29. Big Hero 6, $224.1 million
#96. Sin City: A Dame to Kill For, $39.4 million
For list of the comic-based films in future years, see ICv2’s Best in Shows.
In Box Office
Posted by ICv2 on December 2, 2014 @ 12:46 am CT
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