The 10 Biggest Box Office Hits And Surprises Of 2023 Ranked
2023 is going to be a year that we look back on for some time as an important one in cinema history. We’ve had monster hit movies, yes, but more than that, it was a year of transition for Hollywood. The great box office recovery in the pandemic era continued, but it did so by bucking trends. The charge wasn’t led by superheroes, nor by Disney remakes or anything we’ve come to expect over the last decade or so. From adult-skewing biopics to video game icons, and even faith-based cinema, moviegoers turned out this year in unexpected ways.
This will go down as the first year in decades that sequels didn’t reign supreme atop the global box office. It marks the first time in recent memory that superhero movies, by and large, weren’t a guaranteed pathway to success. It was a year in which one of the biggest movies came out of nowhere after sitting on a shelf for years only to find itself mired in controversy. 2023 is a year for the record books in so many ways.
We’re here to look back at this year at the box office, running down not just the biggest movies of the year — but also the most surprising ones. More than just looking at the movies that sold the most tickets, we’re here to take a deeper look at this year’s biggest success stories. What movies turned the largest profit? Who came out on top? Which moneymakers shocked us the most? To determine this ranking, I looked not just at the hard numbers, but at the cultural impact. The ranking reflects that research, as well as the insights of the my past year of box office coverage here on /Film. There is, without a doubt, much to discuss. Here are the ten biggest box office hits and surprises of the year.