Box office ranking
Put these in order, lowest first. A round deals 3 of 258 to begin with and up to 6 as the run goes on, and it clears only when every tile is where it belongs. You start with 3 lives; a round that does not clear costs one, and 5 cleared in a row earn one back.
Five films in a row look like a ranking, and everyone has a ranking of films already. It is just not this one. The ranking in the head is built from which films mattered, and the one on the board is built from money: every ticket, in every country, at whatever it cost there and then. The two agree at the very top and almost nowhere else.
The line is also stranger than a ranking. Mrs. Doubtfire and The Exorcist, twenty years apart, took the same amount to within about six thousand dollars. Toy Story 2 and Troy are less than ten thousand dollars apart. Those are pairs a round will never ask about, but they show how little a film’s standing tells you about where it sits.
The long middle
A hundred and eighty-six of the 258 took between three hundred million dollars and a billion, and most rounds are decided in that stretch. It is where the reputations are most misleading. E.T. sits beside Mission: Impossible – Fallout. Star Wars, the first one, sits beside the first Guardians of the Galaxy and the first Deadpool. Titanic, the biggest film of its decade by a distance, sits between Jurassic World and Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Fifty-four films in the pack took a billion or more, and only six of those came out before 2009: Titanic, Jurassic Park, The Phantom Menace, The Return of the King, the second Pirates of the Caribbean and The Dark Knight. That is the pull towards the recent, seen in one number. In a round with a modern sequel and an old classic in it, the sequel is usually the one further along.
At the very top the line opens out. Avatar and Avengers: Endgame are within two per cent of each other, and a round can hold only one of them. Below them, the next step down to Avatar: The Way of Water is the widest anywhere in the line.
What was kept, and what the cut costs
The 258 are a cut of Outdo’s 641, made by hand for recognition. What goes is mostly the long tail of films that did well abroad and were never big here, and many of the later instalments of long series. What stays is heavily Hollywood and heavily recent: only twenty-two of the 258 came out before 1990.
The long middle is crowded, and the gap has a price there. Films in the busiest part of it, from about seven hundred and fifty million to eight hundred and sixty million, are dealt less often than the rest, because they sit so close together that a round can take two at most. It is a small effect, a fifth or so at worst, and it is the cost of never asking about a pair of films nobody could tell apart.
Questions
- Why are the films in a round never close in takings?
- Because in any round, the bigger of two grosses is at least fifteen per cent more than the smaller. Unspaced, about half of all five-film rounds from the full list would hold two films within five per cent of each other, and nobody can call that. Fifteen per cent is Outdo’s near miss on the same grosses, rounded up.
- Why 258 films and not all 641?
- Because a round asks you to know five films at once, not two. Outdo’s pack takes every film over the bar that is well enough documented, and that includes plenty that were big somewhere else and never opened widely here. These 258 were picked from it by hand for a UK player to have heard of.
- What happens if one film is out of place?
- The round is lost and costs a life, however close the rest of the line was; there is no partial credit and no near miss. The reveal then shows every tile marked where you put it with its gross, so you can see which film broke the line.
- Is a later film always the bigger one?
- No, though it is the better bet. Grosses are not adjusted for inflation and the world market has grown, so recent films win more rounds than they deserve. But Gone with the Wind still outranks Dune, and Jurassic Park outranks Jurassic World Dominion.
- Does it work without JavaScript?
- You can read the whole page and see the opening round, because it is built as HTML before anything runs. Moving the tiles needs JavaScript, since there is no server to send an arrangement to.
Where the figures come from
Wikidata, under CC0 1.0. Retrieved 2026-09-16.
Box office grosses as recorded on Wikidata, in US dollars and not adjusted for inflation, so a re-release counts wherever the recorded figure includes one. Only films with a gross of at least US$250m and at least 25 Wikimedia sitelinks are included, so every film is recognisable on sight. Worldwide grosses are used; a gross stated for a single territory is excluded, and one with no territory stated is kept. A film whose record gives more than one qualifying gross, with none ranked above the others, is left out rather than guessed at. Grosses recorded only in another currency are left out rather than converted, because a converted figure would be a claim the source never made.
Stickers and patterns drawn from Fluent Emoji by Microsoft, and Phosphor Icons. Fluent Emoji © Microsoft Corporation, and Phosphor Icons © 2023 Phosphor Icons, both under the MIT License.