20. Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) – Total Gross $1,027,044,677
When people think Star Wars, they generally think “Big Money.” This series of movies practically invented the ridiculously drawn-out franchise, whose model has since been poached by Indiana Jones, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and arguably Fifty Shades of Grey. No but seriously: the first Star Wars movie came out 1977 and the ‘last one’ came out in 2005. A thirty-year gap between the first and last installment of a series is almost laughable. But besides being a good director, George Lucas has a good sense of business, and by letting time pass between his movies, he acquired fans and thereby consumers.
19. Jurassic Park (1993) – Total Gross $1,029,939,903
It’s no surprise that based off of the original gross of Jurassic Park, the creators would want to reboot it. And plus in the early 1990s, a billion dollars was a lot of money. To give you an idea, what is now the 19th highest-grossing movie of all time was once the top-grossing movie of all time, a spot it would hang on to for at least four years (we will come back to this much later in the list.) Hard to imagine that the corn-fed Laura Dern could ever have been the main babe of a blockbuster, but hey, the 90s were a crazy time.
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