Looking Back at 2008 Box Office
*The following is for US domestic box office figures unless otherwise specified
1. Dark Knight
And it damn well deserved it. How many times have you seen a movie that EVERYONE likes? The critics liked it. Audiences liked it. Everyone and their dog saw this movie.
Because it was a GOOD movie. The plotting was excellent, the pace high, the characterization deeper than we expected, the acting top notch, it’s just a damn good movie.
In previous years the top film of the year has not been really worthy of that crown. In 2007 it was Spider Man 3, which has a musical interlude. I am not kidding.
In 2006 It was Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest, which was a bloated montrosity threatening to teeter over into its own excess.
2008 was a year when the top movie in dollars might have also been the top movie. Good work moviegoers.
2. Iron Man
Vastly overrated and rightly overshadowed by The Dark Knight, Iron Man was nonetheless a well above-average comic book film, and part of Robert Downey Jr.’s career resurrection.
But watch the two back to back and you really get a sense for how much Iron Man is missing. The action isn’t comparable, the acting neither, obviously the tone is lighter but Iron Man is no grand comedy either.
It’s just a well-made superhero movie, but perhaps it’s success is more reflective of the failures of the other superhero films than Iron Man‘s true merits.
3. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
This movie unfortunately provides evidence and support behind what seems to be a studio trend of doing a lot of remakes, reboots, revivals and so on. Indiana Jones obviously capitalized greatly on the popularity of its predecessors, because the actual movie….kinda sucks.
The action was not as fun and occasionally obviously green screened, there was the ludicrous fridge atomic bomb escape, and Shia LeBeouf practically was stuck playing Fonzi.
The amount of money this film made is not a good thing for lovers of quality filmmaking.
4.Hancock
Will Smith is nigh-unstoppable. Domestically he hasn’t had a film be less than a big hit since 2001’s Ali (and of course now with Seven Pounds). Did anyone actually think Hancock was good all the way through? No way. This movie nosedives in the third act, and it’s a damn shame.
But Smith continues to find intriguing projects, and the marriage of his star power+a potent concept seems to be fairly reliably money in the bank, though not always (cough, Seven Pounds, cough).
5. Wall-E
Pixar has shamed animation films not from Pixar to no end. It isn’t good enough for a animated movie to be good, it has to be Pixar good. And few films are, animated or not.
Wall-E is ambitious and grand, and very much a work of art. Pixar is doing major story work, and the bar is set.
-Dan Benamor