The Highest-Grossing Films of All Time — the 2026 Leaderboard

Seventeen years and two sequels later, still the biggest film ever released. The received wisdom that Avatar left no cultural footprint has always sat oddly against the fact that it has now been the highest-grossing film of all time for fourteen of the last seventeen years, and reclaimed the position each time it was re-released. Streaming on JioHotstar in India.

The only film to have taken the top spot from Avatar, in 2019, and to have lost it back. It remains the biggest global opening ever recorded at $1.223 billion, a mark Spider-Man: Brand New Day did not touch in 2026. Twenty-two films of setup produced the single most efficient piece of event marketing in the medium's history.

Released into a market that had spent three years being told nobody would return to cinemas, and made $2.33 billion. Cameron is the only director with three films on this list, and the only one with two in the top three. The third instalment, Fire and Ash, opened in December 2025 and is on JioHotstar in India.

The most extraordinary entry on the chart. A Chinese animated sequel drawn from the Investiture of the Gods, released for Chinese New Year 2025, which took $2.27 billion — overwhelmingly from a single market. It is the highest-grossing animated film ever made and the highest-grossing non-English-language film ever made, and it did both without a meaningful Western release.

The film that made this chart interesting to the general public in the first place. It held the record for twelve years, has been re-released four times, and is the only entry here from the twentieth century. Adjusted for inflation it would sit comfortably above everything in the top three.

The highest-grossing film in North American history — $936 million domestically, a figure nothing since has approached — carried to sixth place worldwide by a comparatively modest international run. The sequel trilogy's two later instalments are nowhere near this list, which is the clearest measure of how quickly that goodwill was spent.

$2.05 billion for a film that ends with the villain winning and half the cast dead. Marvel's two-part finale is the only case in modern blockbuster history of a studio successfully selling an unresolved ending as an event in itself, and both halves are in the all-time top seven.

The pandemic-era outlier: $1.92 billion at a point when cinema attendance globally was still well below 2019 levels. It is the film that convinced every studio the theatrical business had a future, and the reason Sony was able to open Brand New Day the way it did in 2026. Streaming in India on JioHotstar and SonyLIV.

Disney Animation's biggest film ever, at $1.87 billion, and the second animated title in this top ten — a category that had exactly one entry as recently as 2024. Much of its gross came from China, where the first film was a phenomenon. Already streaming on JioHotstar in India.

The newest arrival, and still moving. Twelve weeks after the biggest opening weekend ever recorded it sits tenth at $1.71 billion, with $1.02 billion of that international. Whether it climbs past Inside Out 2 and No Way Home depends entirely on how long it holds in China and Japan. Still in cinemas.

Pixar's biggest film and, when it opened in 2024, the answer to the question of whether the studio's audience had permanently migrated to Disney+. It had not. $1.7 billion for a sequel about a teenager's anxiety is the most encouraging data point in modern animation.

$1.67 billion in 2015, and the only entry in this top twelve that is neither a Cameron film, a Marvel film, a Star Wars film nor animation. Three sequels have followed and none of them has come close, which makes this less a franchise peak than a one-off.