10 Insane Movie Box-Office Records That Will Probably Never Be Broken

Show me the money!

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20th Century Fox

With the sheer volume of blockbuster releases we're swamped in throughout each year, it feels like every movie that comes out is breaking some sort of box-office record.

Just last month, Disney's Beauty and The Beast remake edged past Batman v Superman to become the biggest March debut on record, and mere weeks before that, bloodthirsty superhero romp Logan earned the largest opening weekend in Wolverine's movie trilogy, quickly becoming Hugh Jackman's highest-grossing standalone outing.

But some feats just weren't meant to be surpassed. With the vast amount of box-office statistics, numbers and achievements that are capable of being tracked, there are hundreds of individual records that movies can claim ownership of, and whether through their enormity, circumstances or reliance on the passage of time, many have become seemingly untouchable.

These range from a movie simply accumulating a tonne of sales to the effects of ticket price inflation creating an insanely high bar that will prove very difficult, if not impossible, to reach.

Note: All figures via Box Office Mojo.

10. Highest Grossing Movie To Never Hit Number One

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Universal Pictures

Current Record Holder: Sing ($269,980,980 - at the time of writing)

Sing's U.S. domestic gross of over $265 million is the largest that any movie has ever achieved without reaching the number one spot, at any point throughout its run.

To put that figure into perspective, it's currently the tenth-highest of 2016 (beating out the likes of Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Doctor Strange and Moana) and accounts for almost half of Sing's total worldwide gross.

But, surprisingly, the highest that the film ever placed was number two. It didn't help that it opened directly opposite Rogue One, but for a film to make so much money and never reach number one is incredibly rare.

The previous record-holder was My Big Fat Greek Wedding back in 2002, with $241.4 million. Sing broke a record that was fifteen years old, and that lengthy time gap does indicate how difficult this will be to beat, and how rare movies that are capable of doing it can be.

Most movies don't even make it past $200 million domestically (only 179, in history, have surpassed that figure), and the ones that do often rely on a huge marketing push or a franchise name in order to do so, and both those things virtually guarantee at least one number one placement.

So for Sing to make so much money with a huge marketing push and a prolific studio behind it, but not hit number one, was a stroke of... luck? Call it what you will, but it'll certainly prove tough to beat.

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Danny has been with WhatCulture for almost nine years, and is currently Doctor Who Editor and WhoCulture Channel Manager, overseeing all of WhatCulture's Whoniverse coverage. He has been writing and video editing for 10+ years, and first got a taste for content creation after making his own Doctor Who trailers and uploading them to YouTube (they're admittedly a bit rusty by today's standards). If you need someone to recite every Doctor Who episode in order or to tell you about the making of 1988's Remembrance of the Daleks, Danny is the person to ask.