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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