New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

Gravity is what BOP describes as a perfect project. Out of the 294 critics on Rotten Tomatoes who have reviewed the movie, an astounding 286 have given it a positive recommendation. That is a fresh rating of 97%. Among movies with at least 100 reviews, only four titles scored higher. On IMDb, over 200,000 viewers have given Gravity a composite score of 8.3, one of the best 120 scores ever on the site.

The box office performance for Gravity is equally impressive. The movie opened to $55.8 million in October. In the process, Gravity claimed the best debut of 2013 for a new property, one that is neither a sequel nor adapted from other source material. An almost incomprehensible 80% of that revenue came from 3D and IMAX 3D showings. The visuals of Gravity are among the best in the 3D era, right there with Avatar and Life of Pi at the top of the list. Audiences responded to this rare incentive to upgrade their tickets. In the process, Gravity earned more revenue at the highest possible ticket prices. 20% of the opening weekend bottom line of Gravity was directly attributed to IMAX 3D, the largest such skew in box office history.

The other key aspect of having an IMAX worthy production is that those films tend to have better staying power than normal titles. IMAX-exclusive contracts are a license to print money for studios, as is reflected in the holdover appeal of Gravity. The average $55 million opener should be expected to finish in the $150-$175 million range. Gravity finished with a domestic tally of $256.2 million, dwarfing that amount by $75-$100 million. In the process, it became the biggest movie in the careers of both George Clooney AND Sandra Bullock, two of the living legends of our industry.

Gravity’s appeal was not limited to North America, either. Innumerable countries have contributed to the International Space Station during its 15 years of existence. This global desire to witness the destruction, an otherworldly version of monument porn, proved to be quite lucrative. Gravity, the movie with only two stars, garnered an additional $415 million abroad. To put that performance into perspective, consider that only two other entirely new properties, Pacific Rim and The Croods, earned at least $350 million in global revenue. And neither of those approached Gravity in terms of overall popularity. With a worldwide take of $670 million against a $100 million production budget, Gravity also claims one of the best returns on investment of any mega-priced blockbuster released in 2013.

When a movie goes into production, the people involved hope for a series of fortuitous events. One is for the movie to be immediately popular, another is for it to have lasting appeal in theaters as well as become an instant classic, a third is to be critically praised, the biggest is for it to be financially rewarding and the final one is for it to be a potential awards contender. That is the basic checklist for grading movie greatness. Looking at this scorecard, Gravity is poised to score a 100 and thereby become the Valedictorian of the 2013 movie class. All it needs is a couple of Academy Awards to seal the deal. Even without those, the unmistakable quality and popularity of Gravity define it as the greatest cinematic triumph of 2013 as well as the Film Industry Story of the Year.

Continued:       1       2