15 Most Profitable Movies Of All Time
4. Avatar (2009)
There's one indisputable fact about the movies that James Cameron makes, and it's that his movies are guaranteed to make money. This is the man who made The Terminator, Aliens, True Lies, Titanic, and of course, Avatar.
Avatar was made only after Cameron was able to create the right technology to shoot it, and because of that, he began developing the film in 1994 — 15 years before it was released. The movie was shot with state of the art motion capture tech, which made it possible to capture the actors' fine facial movements, so they could be mapped to their digital on-screen counterparts.
The movie was nominated for nine Academy Awards, winning three, for Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects. Avatar was a groundbreaking film, having introduced numerous technical advances now common in most major motion pictures utilizing CGI for character creation.
Avatar was expensive, to say the least, and its $237 million budget adjusts to $242 million in 2020. Avatar's $2.79 billion take in 2009 amounts to a staggering $3.380 billion when adjusted for inflation. That brings 20th Century Fox's estimated profit at an adjusted $1.2 billion after all costs are taken into consideration.