A Look Back/A Look Ahead

In a few hours 2012 will be over (in my timezone at least). So I thought it would be appropriate to reflect a little on the past year, as well as look ahead to some of the great things coming in 2013.

2012: the year of superheroes, archers, and box office records.

Six hundred fifty-five films were released and reported grosses during 2012, ranging from the miniscule $117 earned by The Ghastly Love of Johnny X (no I did not make that up), to the mammoth $623 million earned by The Avengers. The domestic box office as a whole earned around $10.8 billion, easily stealing the record for highest grossing year of all time from 2009 ($10.595 billion). The year also takes the record for the most films to reach $1 billion worldwide (if you go ahead and include The Hobbit). Those four films are The Avengers with $1.511 billion, The Dark Knight Rises with $1.081 billion, Skyfall with $1.0002 billion (so far), and The Hobbit with $686 million (so far, but it just has to reach a billion eventually.)

I saw twenty-two of this year's new releases in the theater (some more than once), and I can honestly say that I enjoyed every film I saw in theaters. I obviously enjoyed some more than others, and in different ways for different reasons, but there weren't any films this year that I wish I hadn't paid to see in the theater. The films I saw this year (ordered by domestic box office grosses) were:

The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hunger Games, Skyfall, The Amazing Spider-Man, Brave, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Wreck-It Ralph, Prometheus, The Bourne Legacy, Argo, Rise of the Guardians, Dark Shadows, John Carter, Les Miserables, Looper, ParaNorman, This Means War, Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 3D, Finding Nemo 3D, Frankenweenie,and Premium Rush.

Twenty-two out of six hundred fifty-five. Not such a great record, especially since there are around thirty films that I wanted to see this year but just never got around to seeing them.

2013: Star Trek, (more) superheroes, and the return of Smaug the Terrible

Though 2013 probably won't surpass 2012's record yearly gross, I do think the box office is going to fare quite nicely. There isn't going to be another Avengersesque mammoth haul, but there should be at least eleven films that gross over $200 million domestically, which is the same as 2012. Those films are (ordered by my predictions for their final grosses):

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug, Iron Man 3, Star Trek Into Darkness, Fast & Furious 6, The Hangover Part 3, Thor: The Dark World, Man of Steel, World War Z, Monsters University, and The Lone Ranger. I think that's eleven...I might have lost count.

There's obviously going to be much more to see in the theater between now and a year from now, but this post is already long enough without me listing all one hundred fifty-two films currently scheduled for release in 2013.

I want to see forty-seven of them, so you might get to hear about those (or at least the ones I actually end up seeing).