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The following is a list of highest-grossing sci-fi film franchises and film series of all time. The top 5 are among the highest-grossing franchises of all time. Star Wars sits top with a total gross of $10.3B, while Avatar has the best average of any science fiction series at $2.6B.
- 1900s
- 1910s
- 1920s
- 1930s
- 1940s
- 1950s
- 1960s
- 1970s
- 1980s
- 1990s
In the early 1900's, film had yet to become the dominating entertainment medium that it is recognized as today. In fact, the earliest recognized film recording, the Roundhay Garden Scene, had only been filmed 12 years before the turn of the century. The dawn of the 1900s popularized film being used as a source of entertainment, as before then the p...
Over 20 years after the creation of the first cinema camera, film was becoming more and more of an accessible artform. While not nearly as commonplace as our modern day excursions to the movie theater, all across the world artists from other mediums were beginning to view film as a revolutionary craft, leading to more and more features and short fi...
During the early days of film, specifically the 1910s, a lot of the short films being made were escapist fantasies; experimental stories made by book authors and magicians. However, the 1920s marked a distinct shift in the structure of a lot of genre film, specifically science fiction. As filmmaking became a more sophisticated form, screenwriters a...
While the genre flourished in the decades prior to the 1930s, the early 1930s saw the world climbing out of the economic horrors that marked the Great Depression. As a result of this, the science fiction genre was less idealistic than it had been in years prior. Both literature and film experienced a considerably darker shift in the genre, reflecte...
The 1940s bore witness to the largest scale global conflict of all-time: the meat-grinder known as World War 2. Countless lives were lost, and the effects were felt in culture and art across the world. While the most popular movies being produced at the time were war films, particularly outright propaganda drumming up support for either cause, sci-...
Science fiction in the 1950s went through one of the biggest cultural shifts to ever take place in the genre, a transformation which was directly tied to one of the most horrifying scientific breakthroughs ever. The first and only recorded usage of nuclear weapons was perpetrated against Japan at the tail end of World War 2. Little Boy and Fat Man ...
The popularity of the films made during the "Golden Age" of science fiction persisted through the 1960s, leaving audiences with a deluge of atomic-inspired sci-fi horror as well as the total domination of the Shōwa-era Godzilla films. For most of the '60s it seemed as if aliens and radioactive creatures were everywhere, mostly because those types o...
While the cheap sci-fi horror film never fully went away, 2001 directly led to a surge in smart sci-fi thrillers being released internationally. Movies like The Andromeda Strain, Soylent Green, and Solaris were all slow, methodical science-fiction films that leaned heavily into the philosophical implications of the stories they were telling. At the...
As popular movies generally do in Hollywood, the impact of Star Wars led to a wealth of imitators, most of which fell on the scale of cheap to decent. Battle Beyond the Stars is arguably the most famous of these imitations, mostly due to the fact that the advanced special effects were done by James Cameron himself. Cameron would go on to define the...
If the '50s reflected the paranoia and fear regarding the world's entry into the nuclear age, then the '90s were all about the collective apprehension surrounding the dawn of the Internet Age. Countless films of this time period regarded technology with a sort of curious terror, such as Hardware, which follows a murderous robot enacting a rampage a...
- Chrishaun Baker
Feb 20, 2024 · It’s common knowledge that, in the summer of 1975, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws created the modern blockbuster. But at the time of its release, there had already been plenty of action epics (like...
- Patrick Willems
Jul 16, 2023 · Movie studios re-purposed the word in the late 1940s and '50s, first as a way to sell films to theaters, and later, to lure audiences back from TV by promoting grand epics, often on a...
Feb 7, 2020 · A Dec. 22, 1950, British Daily Mirror article predicted that Cecil B. DeMille’s Samson and Delilah (1949) would be a “box office blockbuster” when it opened in the U.K.; a review in the Nov...
Dec 15, 2015 · Even before the sequels existed, franchise creator Lucas always conceived of the film as existing in the midst of a sprawling science fiction reality with a complex history and a future all its...
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Sep 30, 2023 · What's the biggest sci-fi film ever? Ghostbusters? E.T.? These 10 movies are the highest-grossing sci-fi movies ever based on adjusted box office gross.
