4. People Will Gravitate Towards Quality
The Dark Knight succeeded in a year where Indiana Jones and James Bond both put out their worst entries because it was a realistic, entertaining film with a cracking central performance that people kept coming back to see. Inception was only bettered at the box office by two big fantasy critic proof behemoths (Alice In Wonderland and Harry Potter 7) and the equally adored Toy Story 3 while The Dark Knight Rises took third place only to Skyfall and The Avengers, two of the most fan pleasing films of the past decade. Nolan's films all do so well because if a movie is good, its takings increase by a strong percentage, no matter where on the scale you are. So while Looper made a relatively small gross, the quality of the film meant it was much larger than it would have been otherwise. Theres obviously critic proof films like Transformers and the later Pirates Of The Caribbean that buck the trend, but if you remove these (there are admittedly a lot) the box office can be a fairly predictable beast. Since The Dark Knight hit big, Nolan has become synonymous with quality. People see his name and automatically know theyre going to be treated as smart human beings, given a film thats complex, but still suitable for the wider audience. Thats why a non-franchise film whose main star hadn't been in a blockbuster since 1997 and had some incredibly confusing trailers became a massive success; Nolan is a franchise himself in the same way as Tarantino or Burton. But unlike those two, people dont go for the content of the film, but for the overall, almost guaranteed quality.