Box Office Beyond Borders III: What 2014 Movies Did Other Countries Enjoy More Than We Did?

Expendables 3!

From a certain perspective, the third outing for the Expendables proved the worldwide marketing viability of all-star team-ups, diversity, explosions, and machismo. Probably not in that order.

For the last two years around this time, I asked a question aloud to no one in particular: if we know the highest-grossing movies at the American box office each year, and we know the highest-grossing movies worldwide at all box offices, which movies were the year’s winners if we subtract America’s dollars? What were the rest of Planet Earth’s favorite popcorn flicks?

Box Office Mojo is a fantastic source for fans who can’t get enough number-crunching, being the premiere online source for film revenue tracking. You can check out their 2014 stats for domestic and total worldwide box office as separate lists, but if you want to know only what drove the rest of the world into their respective theaters regardless of American appetites, additional math is required to remove us from the Big Picture.

Lo and behold: I did the math for all of us. Presented below are the forty highest-grossing movies of 2014 outside the U.S. Right this way for the World’s Top 50 Without Us!

Box Office Beyond Borders II: What 2013 Movies Did Other Countries Enjoy More Than We Did?

Cherno Alpha, Pacific Rim

Outside America, Pacific Rim‘s Cherno Alpha is the Boba Fett of a new generation.

Last year around this time, I asked a question aloud to no one in particular: if we know the highest-grossing movies at the American box office each year, and we know the highest-grossing movies worldwide at all box offices, which movies were the year’s winners if we subtract America’s dollars? What were the rest of Planet Earth’s favorite popcorn flicks?

This way for dollar-figure stats!

Box Office Beyond Borders: What 2012 Movies Did Other Countries Enjoy More Than We Did?

Scrat, Ice Age

Everybody on Earth loves Scrat! Except large portions of America.

Anyone with a passing interest in movies, as well as all-out stat junkies like me who can’t get enough of numbers, are well aware that last year’s undisputed box-office champ was Marvel’s The Avengers, which raked in all the monies in the Americas, and nearly 1½ times that overseas. Box Office Mojo has the definitive rankings of the highest-grossing movies in America in 2012, naturally topped by the predictable big-budget spectaculars — The Dark Knight Rises; The Hunger Games; Skyfall; The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey; and so on.

Short-sighted American than I can be sometimes, I rarely pay attention to overseas ticket sales. I was raised with the shallow understanding that American dollars are the only dollars worth tracking and comparing. In my youth I assumed other countries either hated all our movies or patiently waited for them to be released on home video. More and more, though, chatter about film performance elsewhere keeps leaking into media reports, possibly because it gives them another fallback topic on slow news days, or perhaps because such info can provide a more comprehensive answer as to whether or not all those big-budget spectaculars truly earn back their production budget plus tips.

While the aforementioned BOM data compliation covers the domestic and grand-total worldwide grosses of the top films of 2012 (which have also been shared in the February 8th issue of Entertainment Weekly), I decided to examine another aspect of those figures. The following list ranks the twenty highest-grossing films of 2012 in all countries except the U.S.:

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