15 Most Highly-Anticipated Blockbuster Movies In History

When it comes to marketing big-budget blockbusters, awareness and anticipation can often be two very different things. Just because you know a big-budget movie is coming out due to the onslaught of promotional materials across all forms of media, it doesn't mean that you actually want to see it.

Take last year's King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, for example: Warner Bros. spent well over $100m marketing the hell out of the project to make sure everybody was well aware it was coming to theaters, but nobody really cared. As a result, the movie bombed hard and resulted in a huge loss for the studio.

In the last twelve months alone, there have been five movies that made more in their domestic opening weekends than King Arthur managed during its entire global theatrical run; Beauty and the Beast, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and The Incredibles 2.

The major difference? Those projects came surrounded with huge levels of positive buzz, anticipation and audience goodwill as the latest installments in universally-popular brands. Hype is key, and the difference between churning out big-budget movies just for the sake of it and carefully constructing a marketing strategy that reaches fever pitch before opening day can often be the deciding factor between success or failure.

It isn't hyperbole to say that Independence Day is one of the most important summer blockbusters ever made. These days, big-budget movies are promoted across all forms of media almost to the point of saturation, whereas in the past all people really had was a trailer on which to sell their product to audiences. Independence Day took that basic concept and ran with it, inadvertently changing the way blockbusters were marketed forever.

In the space of one thirty-second Super Bowl commercial, Roland Emmerich's sci-fi rocketed to the top of everybody's must-lee list. One of the most famous trailers ever made, the first Independence Day promo both popularized ending TV spots with a spectacular 'money shot' and kicked off the trend of studios paying millions to air movie promos during the Super Bowl. The next day at the water-cooler, all anybody could talk about was Independence Day.

The huge promotional push made sure everyone was aware that Independence Day was on its way, and the anticipation had reached fever pitch by the time it was finally released on July 3, 1996. After six months of build-up and product placement deals with everyone from Apple to Coca-Cola only increasing awareness among the public, audiences flocked to see it and the movie broke numerous box office records on its way to a worldwide total of $817.4m, making it the second highest-grossing movie in history in the process.