Ten Years Ago, Audiences Celebrated With Hobbits, Family-Friendly Musicals, and Ben Stiller at the Christmas 2014 Box Office

2014 was a “last hurrah” year for movies, especially at the box office. This would be the last year until 2020 when a new Star Wars movie didn’t grace movie theaters. It was also the final year of the decade where a new Marvel Studios title didn’t crack $800+ million worldwide. 2014 was the last year before Netflix began making original streaming movies. Then there was American Sniper becoming 2014’s biggest movie in North America, the last time (to date) an R-rated film has topped the annual domestic box office. For the rest of the decade, large-scale franchises like Star Wars and the DC Extended Universe would dominate theaters. 2014 offered one last respite before a new normal dawned.

To cap off this transitional year was the slate of new releases dominating theaters in December 2014. The busiest time of the year, audiences had lots to choose from at their local multiplexes over the holiday season. An odd paradox is at work with the fresh titles defining December 2014’s cinematic landscape. They simultaneously look very different from December 2024’s default theatrical releases, yet also are connected to sagas and trends still reverberating throughout pop culture.

The Biggest December 2014 Movies

Without question, the biggest movie of December 2014 was The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. The final installment in the Hobbit trilogy, this title functioned as the big live-action blockbuster of December 2014 by default. Though not quite as big as the original Lord of the Rings films or Avatar, it still made a pretty penny domestically with a $255.1 million haul. Exempting American Sniper (which began its limited-release run on Christmas Day 2014), Five Armies was the only December 2014 new release to exceed $130 million domestically. Three years later, December 2017 would produce a whopping three.

Second biggest among December 2014 features was Into the Woods, with a $128 million gross. This title, along with fellow newcomers Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb and Annie, were clearly trying to mimic past Christmastime smash hits. Woods and Annie were hoping to be the next December musical smash hits following Dreamgirls and Les Miserables. Tomb, meanwhile, was returning to the late December launchpad the first Museum excelled in. Much like in A Christmas Carol, the ghosts of Christmas’s past lingered mightily over December 2014.

Perhaps that overt familiarity is why these titles didn’t exceed expectations. Secret of the Tomb especially made significantly less than its predecessors, likely because it was the first Museum movie in nearly six years. The dearth of sizable juggernauts meant that November 2014 holdovers like The Hunger Games: Mockingjay – Part 1 and Big Hero 6 contributed mightily to December 2014’s domestic haul. Arthouse titles fresh to this month also scored some decent numbers. It’s hard to imagine a low-key comedy like Top Five launching theatrically just before Christmas in 2024, but nobody blinked at that release decision in 2014.

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What Else Populated the December 2014 Box Office Landscape?

Though not attached to a major franchise, it’s worth bringing up, too, the Hindi-language film PK and its domestic box office success. Launching over the December 19-21, 2014 weekend in the U.S., it grossed a robust $10.6 million in North America. That made it the first Hindi-language feature to exceed the eight-digit mark in this territory. Just five years earlier, 3 Idiots had been relegated to dollar theaters in North America. PK, meanwhile, showed that various strains of Indian cinema could make big bucks in major North American theaters. Since then, further Indian blockbusters have opened in this territory around December, including Dangal and the 2024 smash hit Pushpa 2: The Role.

That’s just one of several ways December 2014’s new releases feel oddly similar to December 2024’s titles. Ten years after the Hobbit trilogy concluded, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim is now entering theaters hoping for box office glory. Meanwhile, more Hunger Games movies are on the horizon while Wicked (though it opened in the pre-Thanksgiving slot) is bound to make money over Christmas weekend like Into the Woods and Annie did. Hollywood’s very specific idea of what constitutes “holiday season programming” would not budge much even as so much else got overhauled in the industry after 2014.

December 2014 ultimately grossed $904.05 million, the lowest-grossing December between 2013 and 2019. The following year, The Force Awakens would propel December 2015 to a 45% better domestic haul and $1.1+ billion cumes became normal for December. Relying so heavily on the lowest-grossing Hobbit movie and big-screen comedies like Top Five makes December 2014 look quaint by comparison, Ten years later, Hollywood is still exploiting the genres and brand names that dominated December 2014. However, so much else about this box office landscape is now radically different from the new cinematic normal.