Hotel Transylvania
2012
$358,400,000
worldwide gross
Bridget Jones's Diary
2001
?
more, or less?
Box office
Two of 641 — one shows its worldwide gross, the other hides it. Say whether the hidden one is more or less and keep going. A tie counts as correct; one wrong answer ends the run, including a near miss within 10%.
A film’s size in memory is made of the wrong material. It is built from how much the film was talked about, how long it stayed in cinemas, whether you saw it with a queue outside, and how often it has been on television since. None of that is money. The figure this pack asks about is narrower and stranger: the number of tickets sold, everywhere, multiplied by whatever a ticket cost in that country in that year. A film that defined a summer can lose that comparison to one nobody will remember in a decade, and it frequently does. Jaws is usually credited with inventing the summer blockbuster. On the recorded figures, it took less money than Minions: The Rise of Gru.
Why the intuition fails
Three things move the number that have nothing to do with how big a film was, and all three push in the same direction.
The first is the price of a ticket. A dollar in 1977 is not a dollar in 2019, and the figures here are not adjusted, so every older film is measured in money that has since lost most of its value. The second is the size of the world market. A modern release opens on the same weekend in dozens of countries with multiplexes that did not exist a generation ago, while a film from the 1970s reached many of those markets late, briefly or not at all. The third is the sequel. A franchise’s later instalments arrive into an audience the first one built, so the film that started everything is often the smallest in its own series. The original Toy Story took less than any of its three sequels, and barely a third of the fourth.
Put together, these produce a pack that quietly rewards the recent. The films most people would name as the biggest of all time are, in money, frequently mid-table, and the films at the top are overwhelmingly from the last fifteen years. The guess that works is not which film mattered more but which film came out later and had a number after its title.
What the data is and what it is not
The pack leans heavily towards this century: 521 of its films were released in 2000 or later, and only 32 before 1990. That is partly inflation and partly the bar itself, which is a fixed number of dollars that has never moved with prices, and so is far easier for a recent film to clear.
It also leans American. Grosses are counted in dollars, the notability bar favours films that have been written about in many languages, and several of China’s biggest films fall below it. A pack of the world’s highest-grossing films as a Chinese or Indian audience would recognise them would look noticeably different.
One thing nearly went wrong in the fetching, and it went wrong quietly. The first version of the query asked Wikidata for films, and Wikidata answered with films — which, it turned out, did not include Frozen. Many animated films are recorded as animated films and never as films, so over a hundred of them, WALL-E and Spirited Away among them, were missing from a pack that claimed to contain every film above the bar. The query now asks for all three kinds.
Questions
- Why US dollars, and why not adjusted for inflation?
- Because the source records box office in dollars, and the pack shows the figure the source gives. Converting to pounds would publish a number nobody reported, and it would change whenever the exchange rate moved rather than when a film took more money, so a gross recorded only in another currency is left out. Adjusting for inflation would mean choosing a price index and a year to adjust from, and a re-released film has no single year. The unadjusted figure is the one with a receipt.
- Why are there no posters?
- Because a poster is the studio’s artwork, and no free licence covers it; crediting a picture does not make it ours to publish. Free logos exist for only some of the films, and even those are unreliable: one is a French title card, another sits in a black box. So no card shows a logo. Each carries stickers chosen by hand for something the film is known for, over a pattern for its genre.
- How accurate are the figures?
- They are worldwide grosses as recorded on Wikidata. A gross stated for a single country is not used; one with no country stated is kept. Where a film was re-released, its figure includes the re-release if the recorded figure does. A film still in cinemas when its record was last edited keeps that figure until somebody updates it.
- Why is a film I know missing?
- Usually because it grossed under US$250m worldwide. Otherwise, the film has fewer than 25 pages across Wikimedia’s projects, which drops several Chinese blockbusters that most UK players have never heard of; or its gross is recorded only in another currency; or its record gives more than one qualifying gross with nothing to say which is right, in which case it is left out rather than guessed at.
- Does the pack change?
- Yes, and faster than most. New films cross the bar every few months and recent films’ grosses keep rising after release, so the pack is marked volatile and due a review every six months. A regeneration re-runs the same query and rewrites only what changed, so a film enters the pack when its recorded gross crosses the bar.
- Can I play it without JavaScript?
- You can read all of it and see the opening pair, because the page is built as HTML before anything runs. Guessing needs JavaScript, since there is no server to send a guess 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.