10 Box Office Hits From 2014 Which Should Have Bombed

8. The Purge: Anarchy

Budget: $9 million Box office: $110.6 million Like Luc Besson's Lucy, The Purge: Anarchy is another movie released this year which thinks it is a lot smarter than it actually is. Following on from the original movie but shifting gears away from the variation on the home invasion we saw before, this time the protagonists spend much of their time out in the open city trying to find a safe haven. Writer-director James DeMonaco deserves some credit for attempting to inject an interesting socio-political subtext into The Purge: Anarchy, but it's a shame that these ideas aren't explored in more detail - the arrival of the upper class Purgers could have been the catalyst for some scathing satire but instead leads to a predictable shoot out in which it is hard to really care about the outcome. A marginal improvement over the original it may be, but nevertheless The Purge: Anarchy squandered an opportunity to maximize on its potential.