20 HUGE Hit Movies NOBODY Saw Coming
4. Fahrenheit 9/11
Even accepting that Michael Moore was a genuine rock-star documentarian at the turn of the century, with his gun control doc Bowling for Columbine pulling in $58 million globally, nobody saw Fahrenheit 9/11's box office run coming.
Though Moore's subject matter was of enormous public interest - covering both the presidency of George W. Bush and the Iraq War - that still doesn't really explain how it was able to gross an astonishing $222.4 million.
This not only made Fahrenheit 9/11 the highest-grossing documentary of all time at this point, but it ended up out-grossing far buzzier and more expensive narrative features from 2004 such as Collateral, The Terminal, Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, and King Arthur, to name just a few.
This really speaks to how documentary-friendly the theatrical landscape was in the mid-2000s, though with docs more-or-less pigeonholed into "specialty" territory these days and positioned to be watched at home, we'll probably never see a doc dominate the box office like this ever again.