2000s in film

Trends

• The 2000s saw the resurgence of several genres. Fantasy film franchises dominated the box office with The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, the Star Wars prequel trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, etc. Comic book superhero films became a blockbuster subgenre following the releases of X-Men, Unbreakable, and Spider-Man; culminating in the unprecedented achievements of The Dark Knight in both revenue and acclaim. Gladiator sparked the revival of historical epics set in ancient times, and the Bollywood-inspired Moulin Rouge! did the same for live action musical films in the Western world. Hong Kong fight choreographers like Yuen Woo-ping continued their influence in Hollywood with such martial arts films as Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2, even leading to the spread of wire fu into other subgenres alongside filmmaker John Woo's gun fu from the likes of Mission: Impossible 2.
• Certain film categories that were generally not popular in North America became more attractive to western moviegoers. Subtitled non-English language films such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Amélie, Hero, The Passion of the Christ, Pan's Labyrinth, and Apocalypto ; as well as feature-length documentaries like Fahrenheit 9/11, March of the Penguins, Earth, and Michael Jackson's This Is It; ended up being very successful.
• Computer animation replaced traditional animation as the dominant technique for animated pictures in American cinema, especially after the release of Shrek, which is the first film to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Further extending to the exploration of motion capture technology in such films as Robert Zemeckis' The Polar Express, Beowulf, and A Christmas Carol. However, hand-drawn anime films also gained more exposure outside of Japan with the releases of Hayao Miyazaki's Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, and Ponyo; while stop-motion films earned significant audience interest thanks to Chicken Run, Corpse Bride, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Coraline. DreamWorks Animation was the top animation studio of the decade, with Pixar and 20th Century Fox Animation following close behind.
• Major film studios started to focus their budgets on established titles with built-in fandoms to lower the risk of commercial failures and maximize financial profits. Increasing the productions of sequels, prequels, remakes, reboots, adaptations, spin-offs, crossovers, and so on; often as attempts to create or revive franchises. Capitalizing especially on nostalgia induced by the likes of Shaft, Charlie's Angels, Planet of the Apes, Scooby-Doo, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Freddy vs. Jason, Starsky & Hutch, Alien vs. Predator, Herbie: Fully Loaded, The Dukes of Hazzard, King Kong, Superman Returns, Miami Vice, Rocky Balboa, TMNT, Live Free or Die Hard, Transformers, Rambo, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, and many others. Out of the 50 highest-grossing films of the decade worldwide, only nine are not based on another property, though one of these became the top-grosser of all time: late 2009's Avatar.

  Highest-grossing films