Order Movies by Box Office — From Donnie Darko to Avatar
Each card in this quiz names a movie, its director and its year. The board starts with one card already on it. The quiz then gives you one card at a time, and you put each card in the row from the smallest box office to the largest.
A correct placement shows the worldwide gross and keeps the card on the board. One wrong placement ends the run. You cannot move a card after you place it, so each choice is final.
The pool holds 100 movies and each run deals 20 of them, so two runs are never the same. The pool is not the list of the 100 highest-grossing movies. Those all sit between one and three billion dollars, which makes the order close to a guess. This pool runs from 7.5 million dollars to 2.9 billion dollars, so a run gives you real gaps to reason about.
The cards carry no poster and no still. Movie artwork is under copyright, so this quiz uses text only.
How to play
The row is sorted by worldwide box office. The smallest gross is at one end and the largest gross is at the other end.
One card starts on the board. Its gross is shown.
The quiz gives you one card at a time. Put it in the gap where you think it belongs.
A correct placement shows the gross of the movie. The card stays on the board and the quiz gives you the next card.
A wrong placement ends the run. The quiz then shows you the correct gap.
You cannot move a card after you place it.
Your score is the number of cards on the board at the end. The maximum score is 20.
A perfect run places all 20 cards with no mistake.
What counts in this quiz
Worldwide lifetime gross in US dollars. The figure is the total from every country, not the United States alone.
Re-releases count. Several older movies in the pool, such as Jurassic Park and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, earned part of their total after a later cinema run.
100 well-known movies from 1960 to 2024. The pool mixes the largest movies ever made with small movies that most people know.
Two movies that are within three percent of each other count as equal. Home Alone and The Matrix are two percent apart, so the board takes either order.
What's not included — and why
The figures are not adjusted for inflation. A ticket in 1975 cost a small part of what a ticket costs today, so Jaws would rank far higher on an adjusted list.
Every figure is rounded to two significant figures. A reported gross carries less precision than its digits suggest, and the rounding keeps the board honest about that.
Streaming numbers, home video sales and television rights are not counted. The quiz uses cinema box office only.
The pool holds one movie per title. The Lion King of 1994 is in the quiz; the version of 2019 is not.
Good to know
Avatar lost the record to Avengers: Endgame in 2019, then took it back in 2021 after a re-release in China.
The Shawshank Redemption made about 73 million dollars in cinemas. It found its audience on television and home video years later.
Titanic held the worldwide record for 12 years, until the same director beat it with Avatar.
Donnie Darko earned about 7.5 million dollars. It opened one month after September 2001, and its poster shows a jet engine.