50 Highest-Grossing Movies Of All Time Ranked
50. Transformers: Age Of Extinction (2014)
Box Office: $1.104 billion (#21 highest-grossing of all time)
The fourth entry into Michael Bay's Transformers franchise just might be the worst of the lot. Bloated out to an insane 165 minutes, focusing far too eagerly on the (awful) human characters, rife with icky product placement and not even giving the heavily-marketed Dinobots much screen time, Age of Extinction is a brutal slog of a movie.
There's even a scene that hand-waives statutory rape and another where a character whines about modern cinema being nothing but sequels and remakes. It's like Bay is deliberately trying to antagonise his detractors at this point, and nothing this film offers feels remotely as compelling as the previous entry's Battle of Chicago.
49. Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (2011)
Box Office: $1.045 billion (#26)
The fourth Pirates of the Caribbean movie is the first that's also truly forgettable, suffering from the absence of Orlando Bloom and Keira Knightley, the introduction of bland new replacement characters (played by Sam Claflin and Àstrid Bergès-Frisbey) and a general feeling of listlessness.
Where's the joyful swashbuckling adventure that made the first two films so much fun in particular? It's a depressingly by-the-numbers outing with a generic plot, a lame-brained romance between Jack Sparrow - whose shtick is wearing rather thin by this point - and Penelope Cruz's Angelica, and an underwhelming villain in Blackbeard (despite Ian McShane's efforts).
The run-time is a little kinder than the previous film, but it's still so damn boring.
48. Alice In Wonderland (2010)
Box Office: $1.025 billion (#31)
Though on paper a Tim Burton-directed live-action Alice in Wonderland movie should've worked out pretty well, this is ultimately a gaudy, garish experience that's the cinematic equivalent of chugging an entire bag of Skittles in one go.
The art direction's fine, but the visual effects themselves are all over the place, Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter are just warming-over their usual hamminess, and poor Mia Wasikowska is left stranded with little to do.
The most surprising thing about the movie is just how dull it is, despite the clear time, effort and money poured into bringing Lewis Carroll's imaginative world to the big screen.
47. Spider-Man 3 (2007)
Box Office: $890.9 million (#50)
Destined to go down in history as one of the most colossally disappointing superhero sequels of all time, Spider-Man 3 failed to live up to both the astronomical hype and the high standard of its predecessors.
The main problem with Spider-Man 3 is its desire to please everyone: the movie has at least one villain too many, Venom (Topher Grace) was a total disappointment, Sandman (Thomas Hayden-Church) killing Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson) was a terrible ret-con, and the "dark Peter" (Tobey Maguire) subplot was just embarrassing.
After two great Spidey movies, Sam Raimi and Maguire's final outing together was a bit of a bust, lacking the charm of what came before while doubling down on ugly CGI bombast and an excess of characters.
46. Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World's End (2007)
Box Office: $963.4 million (#39)
The third Pirates movie finds the series at its most self-indulgent, with an absurd 168-minute runtime bloated out by needless surreal asides and stamina-draining subplots.
Depp's drunken pirate act is still fun to a point and the action sizzles, even if this is generally the accepted point at which the Pirates franchise, pardon the pun, jumped the shark.
An ambitious but wheel-spinning second sequel, At World's End is fitfully fun but would also be much more entertaining if it was about 40 minutes shorter. It's too much of a muchness, and therefore a bit of a chore to get through, all things considered.