The Worst Highest Grossing Movies of All Time

Actually, now that I set the bottom limit for what a "high grossing film" is at $300 million, I think I probably got all of the ones that deserve to make this list. It's possible I may have missed a couple but I don't think so.

and I'm very pleased that Bayformers is the most-guessed answer here. Death to Michael Bay...

that's a really interesting idea! :) but... I think it would be even more difficult to research than this one was.

btw, Aliens did great at cinemas! It was the 7th highest-grossing film of 1986. Bladerunner on the other hand got it's butt kicked by E.T. in 1982... but it didn't do THAT bad. It beat Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Airplane 2, released the same year.

I don't remember exactly but seemed like people were trying much harder before the update... the averages have gone way down. I think.

Maybe it's because, like I said, the quiz is getting a bit large. People might give up before time after they get a few.

You'd probably get along with my cousin. I think the only movie he has ever said he didn't like was Wes Craven's vampires

To be honest, I thought the 2nd Pirates movie was okay though it started to drag toward the end and the later ones just became tedious. I thought the two Hangover movies, while earning more than they deserved and certainly not great films, were really not much worse than the vastly overrated first Hangover movie. I thought Taken 2, while definitely unnecessary and not as good as the first movie, was not as bad as critics made it out to be. GI Joe Retaliation I thought was fine for what it was. And The Last Airbender, while bad, doesn't deserve the #1 spot IMO. It was no worse than most of Shayamalan's movies post-6th Sense and leagues better than any of the Bayformers movies.

I don't think I saw Book of Secrets but it would only mildly surprise me if it was actually better than the (terrible) original. I mean, it wouldn't take much.

I could include better clues..... though.... sometimes, personally, I feel that it can ruin a quiz. It can be fun to get all the right answers, but it can also be fun to take a quiz like this and just see how many right answers you come up with off the top of your head. In my opinion, anyway.

I'm not sure if clues would help or hurt this quiz. I guess I could try it..

I think they're pretty spot-on most of the time, though, sometimes, inexplicable things happen like Fast Five being rated near 90% fresh. And some truly brilliant movies like Fight Club and South Park are rated lower than they ought to be simply because some reviewers will be offended or fail to get them. But as an indication of roughly how well liked the film is by critics it's not a bad system. This was before they moved to adopting weighted scores- that happened recently and I haven't had time to get a feel for the new system now which is confusing and difficult to understand.

I think if this were adjusted for inflation or if it only included domestic and not international gross, then ID4 would be higher up the list, but even in those scenarios its perplexingly high RottenTomatoes score of 60% still places it below many of these films. We do have Godzilla which I think was made by the same creative team, though. That doesn't count for anything?

ugh. the National Treasure movies were TERRIBLE... at least IMO (this actually is a matter of opinion!). The Pirates movies were better... and personally I enjoyed he weird parts... but after the first one which was solid but overrated the other ones just felt bloated and overlong and really dragged in parts. That's how I felt watching them and I believe that was the critical consensus as well. Still, that said, they're among the best-reviewed movies on this list. They just happened to also make boatloads of booty at the box office which, using the above formula, gives them a higher score.

Dead Man's Chest, for instance, is actually the best-reviewed movie in the entire quiz at 53% fresh. That means the majority of critics who saw it had mostly positive things to say about it.

It wasn't terrible but definitely not as good or as fresh as the first one, and I could see some of the other problems that reviewers had with it as well. Still, probably doesn't deserve to be in the same company as the Smurfs, Chipmunks, Bayformers and Twilight sequels.

I may update/overhaul this at some point and if I do I plan to make it a bit easier. I may go the route that QM took on some of his similar quizzes and if you guess Twilight just give you credit for all of those "movies", etc.

My personal opinion: some of the pirates sequels had their moments, but overall were pretty boring and bloated after the first one.

Hancock was okay up until the 3rd act.

The 2nd Hangover was okay, I guess, even if it was completely derivative and didn't live up to the (overrated) original.

GI Joe Retaliation was okay, I guess, for what it was. Better than the first one.

If you liked any of the others on here then we have different tastes.

I've been meaning to re-do this quiz with updated data and after adding some hints for a long time now but never got around to it.

You're probably right about needing clues and the quiz being too hard. I think you're mistaken about it being random guessing (and also misusing the phrase "shooting fish in a barrel"- which means something is very simple), if you are familiar with box office totals and how well movies are received by critics you could come up with all these answers. I'm also not sure what you mean about the Hobbit movies. Intensely despised? By whom? They weren't as good as the LotR trilogy but not quite that bad.

But this quiz is also badly in need of an update. If I ever get around to it I'll add clues.

That's considerably worse than The Hobbit.

The last Fantastic Four movie was a gigantic flop, not popular at all. The first one was modestly popular but nowhere near as big as any of the above movies, and its reviews weren't as bad, either.