20 Recent Movies You Had NO IDEA Were Box Office Hits
8. Flow
On paper, there was absolutely nothing to suggest that a low-budget Latvian wordless animated film about a cat trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world would do much business at all theatrically.
But Flow, which was made for a lowly €3.5 million, enjoyed a successful festival run throughout 2024, gaining enough momentum that it even went on to win the Best Animated Feature Oscar against considerably higher-profile, bigger-budget competition like Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot.
Even so, few would've pegged it for a major theatrical breakout, and yet Flow ended up grossing €50 million worldwide, in turn becoming the most-viewed theatrical film in Latvian history.
Considering that Flow was made by a small but passionate team far outside the mainstream animation paradigm, even using open-source software Blender, it's nothing short of miraculous that it managed to make so much money entirely on its own terms. You love to see it.