10 More Huge Box Office Hits NOBODY Saw Coming

There are those movies that have "big box office" written all over them from the second they're officially confirmed to be in production. Take the incoming Deadpool & Wolverine adventure, for example.

Despite being the Marvel Cinematic Universe's first-ever R-rated movie, it's all but certain a film featuring the returns of both Ryan Reynolds and Hugh Jackman's titular anti-heroes, a ton of exciting cameos, and the 20th Century Fox and Disney superhero worlds colliding, will make all kinds of dollar when it drops in July.

But then you have those other features that perhaps didn't seem like as much of a guaranteed money-maker at a glance. Those films that initially looked like just your average movie-star-boasting actioner, lazy sequel, or chunk of bizarre sci-fi thrown out by an up-and-coming director, only for the eventual projects to go on to become some of the most unexpectedly successful big-screen creations of all time.

Few would have predicted that everything from a dark drama focusing on a Bat-villain, to a movie about space wizards and cyborgs would have made one hell of a splash at the box office in the end. But that's exactly what they did, proving that you never really know which new slice of cinema is going to take the world by storm.

Before his little project by the name of District 9 invaded movie theatres in 2009, you would have struggled to find many out there who'd heard of the name Neill Blomkamp.

Outside of working as a VFX artist and 3D animator on the likes of Stargate SG-1 and Dark Angel, the South African-Canadian creator had also directed the Halo: Landfall short film project in 2007 that was used to hype up the incoming Halo 3 game.

When a planned Blomkamp-directed Halo movie fell through, though, that film's producer, The Lord of the Ring's Peter Jackson, opted to turn his attention to one of the director's other pieces of work for a potential new project. And while you'd think that a big-screen adaptation of Blomkamp's 2005 short film Alive in Joberg would probably struggle to bring in an audience quite as big as a movie based on one of the most popular video games of the time in 2009, you'd be wrong.

Following on from a brilliant viral marketing campaign, this $30 million-budgeted story of an alien race arriving on Earth - which also masterfully explores themes of racism and xenophobia - went on to bring in a staggering $210 million at the box office.

A low-budget sci-fi film this bold, being led by the unknown that was the terrific Sharlto Copley and directed by the relatively inexperienced Blomkamp, not only making a massive profit, but also scooping up an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture was not on anyone's movie bingo card coming into 2009.