Top 500 Hollywood Movies Of All Time

The most common answer to the question What is The Most Successful Hollywood Movie? is of course Avatar. James Cameron’s 2010 masterpiece grossed close to $3bn worldwide, very closely followed by Avengers: End Game at $2.8bn.

Avatar 2: The Way of Water is currently at $2.3bn worldwide gross and still climbing. It’s doubtful it will reach the celestial heights of the original.

There are many ways of measuring success however.

Return on Investment

Measuring by sheer box office gross of course privileges blockbuster movies with big marketing budgets.

Whereas tracking the return on investment i.e. the percentage of budget recovered, surfaces some different films and different answers to ‘what is the most successful movie’.

By this metric Avatar does pretty well (1,233%) but Avatar 2 is struggling to transcend its mighty $400m budget with only 772% returned to date. (Even Titanic only recovers 1,101%).