As you know, things are weird.
Things are so weird, in fact, that movie studios and box office exhibitors are postponing weekend tracking numbers for the foreseeable future. That’s not really a surprise because hardly any theaters are still open in the United States. Why bother reporting the amount of money movies are making if no movies are making money?
Until the COVID-19 pandemic ends, I doubt we will be doing the Weekend Wrap-Up column like usual and that’s completely understandable given the circumstances. But you know what, I really like putting this piece together weekly and, looking at the site traffic, you folks like reading it. So instead of reporting current numbers, let’s use this time to take a stroll down memory lane. Let’s take a look back at a year, ages ago, when a Mel Gibson comedy was 1) a thing and 2) made money. Let’s take a look back at a year when Jim Carrey was still the biggest star in the land. Let’s take a look back at a year when being a superhero film didn’t necessarily mean you’d be the top movie.
Let’s go back to the year 2000, when the movies were shorter, the grosses were smaller and the internet was slower. Below you’ll find the top ten domestic hits of the year 2000. It was a wild year with a lot of hits that we still remember today.
The Top Grossing Films of 2000 (Domestic)
The first thing you’ll notice about the year 2000 is that Ron Howard’s How The Grinch Stole Christmas took the top spot. That might be surprising to 2020 standards but it’s not that crazy when you think of the world back in 2000. This was before Marvel, before Disney bought everything and before Jim Carrey’s star power had faded a bit. You have to remember that Carrey used to be big with a capital B. The man’s movies were massive events. 2000 was still a time when an actor or actress was the main draw for a film, movies could have huge openings based solely on the strength of the name on the marquee. Nowadays, films find their power with shared universes, sequel strength or the pull of a studio. Like I said, 2000 was a different time.
So it’s not surprising that Grinch was the biggest movie of the year. The film started with a then-remarkable opening of $55 million and was released right around the holidays, which brought in huge crowds. Was it a good movie? Well, um, about that. No, no it wasn’t. How The Grinch Stole Christmas is, in my opinion, something of a disaster. Carrey pours his heart into it but it feels very odd to have him portray the Grinch plus he seems bogged down by the torturous make-up. The story is, well, fine I suppose but Howard decided to make the whole film look like some sort of hazy fever dream. There are bizarre angles, creepy make-up choices and an overall sense of delirium. It’s just odd.
But, hey, audiences ate it up and it was the biggest movie of the year as we entered the new millennium.
Grinch was followed closely by an actually good film, Robert Zemeckis’s Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks in a true powerhouse performance. Cast Away is a movie people still gush over today and with good reason. Most of the film’s lengthy run time is just Hanks on a deserted island but there is something hypnotic about the movie, it really sucks you in. And, despite a few big blockbuster sequences (this is Robert Zemeckis after all), the movie feels rather quiet, rather small. It’s calming in a strange way. Of course Hanks is phenomenal. The fact that he lost the Oscar to Russell Crowe seems more and more bizarre as the years go on.
Speaking of Crowe, his film Gladiator clocked in at number four behind Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible II. What did I tell you about star power? Again and again you see movies that were mega-smashes because of the power of the lead star. When Gladiator came out Crowe was not as big as he would soon be. In fact, this was the movie that made many people aware of the actor. But look at Cast Away, What Women Want (number 5), Meet The Parents (number 7) or What Lies Beneath (number 10) — these are movies that garnered an audience because people loved the stars. Of course, the movies had to be more than just lead performers but the value of a Hollywood actor or actress meant a lot more back in 2000.
The thing that stands out to me most about the ten biggest films of 2000 is X-Men (number 8). It’s hard to recall now but superhero movies weren’t always big hits. In fact there was a time when they were ridiculed and almost completely ignored (does anyone remember Steel starring Shaq? Exactly.) Comic book movies were often poorly-made, horribly-cast and totally forgettable. X-Men was the first superhero film in a long, long time that took its source material seriously and audiences rewarded it. X-Men was a hit. Sure, the numbers you see above pale in comparison to later Marvel films but the movie was undeniably large when it first opened. It was an adult take on superheroes and was actually worth a damn. Fox paid close attention and launched an entire franchise while other studios started their own superhero projects. 2002 would bring us Spider-Man, which would be a total game-changer and then, a year after that, Batman Begins would change things once again. Comic book films are the biggest thing on Earth now and some would argue that it all started with X-Men and Fox’s insistence on taking superheroes seriously.
And that was the year 2000, a 12-month period that gave us one of Jim Carrey’s last huge hits and the start of multiple series (I see you, Scary Movie and Meet The Parents). The following year would bring a lot of change at the box office and the world at large. And 2001’s top ten list contained three mega-franchises in their infancy. Things were definitely taken up a notch. We’ll cover that next week.