2. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone (2001)
The Trend: Adapting popular fantasy books for the big-screen. It's the Harry Potter franchise again! Damn that boy wizard and his far-reaching influence on the modern blockbuster. Over ten years, the series became the most lucrative in Hollywood history with worldwide grosses of over $7.7bn with all eight of the adaptations among the top 50 biggest movies of all time. Since then, studios have tried desperately to find the next literary adaptation to generate big box office and bar The Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games, most have failed miserably. In the last decade alone we have seen Beautiful Creatures, Cirque de Freak: The Vampire's Assistant, City of Ember, Eragon, The Golden Compass, The Host, I Am Number Four, Inkheart, Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones, Seeker: The Dark Is Rising, Stormbreaker, and Vampire Academy fail to make it past one movie. Out of this huge number of adaptations, Percy Jackson managed to get a sequel and The Chronicles of Narnia made it to three movies before middling box office grosses put both franchises on hold, with none even coming close to matching the commercial success of 'the big three'. Nonetheless, the adaptations keep coming thick and fast. Next month sees the release of Divergent, with the $80m budgeted movie so confident in its chances of success that sequels have already been announced for 2015 and 2016. The Maze Runner also gets its chance to make an impact when it hits theaters in September, before The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 arrives in November to devour the box office once again.
I don't do social media, so like or follow me in person but please maintain a safe distance or the authorities will be notified. Don't snap me though, I'll probably break. I was once labelled a misogynist on this very site in a twenty paragraph-long rant for daring to speak ill of the Twilight franchise. I stand by what I said, it's crap.
