They aren’t sequels, prequels, remakes, or adaptations of novels, comic books, or fairy tales — but they did make money.
Christian Bale in Out of the Furnace
Relativity
This weekend, Out of the Furnace — an original film co-written by Brad Ingelsby and director Scott Cooper (Crazy Heart) and based on nothing other than the ideas in their heads — opened with just $5.3 million, one of the worst wide opening weekends of the year. It was so bad, in fact, that the film's studio, Relativity Media, felt compelled to release a statement saying, "There's no better swing for a studio to take than one with a daring story from a renowned director and an award-winning cast."
Unfortunately, Hollywood rarely takes that kind of swing any more.
This same weekend, moviegoing audiences could also buy tickets to see, in wide release, the sequel to an adaptation of a popular YA novel series, an animated musical version of a classic fairy tale, a sequel to an adaptation of a popular comic book, a remake of a successful French-Canadian comedy, an adaptation of a popular pulp crime novel, a sequel to a popular romantic comedy, and an adaptation of a popular historical novel. The only other technically original film to crack the top 10 at the box office, in fact, was Dallas Buyers Club, a film based on real events — i.e., not an original story solely from the filmmakers' imagination, even if the screenplay itself is not "based" on any pre-existing material — and in a semi-limited release of 734 theaters.
In 2013, only one truly original film (Gravity) even cracked the top 10 grossing films of the year. Ten years ago, in 2003, there were three original films in the top 10 of the year — Finding Nemo, Bruce Almighty, and Elf. Just five years before that, the top five highest-grossing films of 1998 were all original stories — Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon, There's Something About Mary, The Waterboy, and A Bug's Life.
To be clear, there were still original films that made an impact at the box office this year, but you have to scan pretty far down the year's full box office list before you can round up even 15 of them.
Note: While The Conjuring and 42 are technically original films insofar as their screenplays are not based on pre-existing material, they were not included in the following list since they are both based, at least in part, on actual people and events. This isn't a judgment on either film's quality — for this particular list, we are interested only in films that were wholly invented by their respective filmmakers. This used to be the coin of the realm in Hollywood; now it's the rarest currency in American studio filmmaking.
Gravity
Total domestic gross: $251,515,000
Total global gross: $617,115,000
Rank for all 2013 domestic box office: 6
This isn't just an original film — it's wildly, epically, historically original, featuring just two on camera speaking roles and literally reinventing what it even means to set a modern feature film in space. A serious Oscar contender, Gravity may still rank lower than Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, Man of Steel, and Monsters University at the box office, but it is the only one of those films to be No. 1 at the box office for three weekends in a row.
Warner Bros.
The Croods
Total domestic gross: $187,168,425
Total global gross: $587,204,668
Rank for all 2013 domestic box office: 12
Released way back in March, this film about a family of cave people was just a mid-range performer for DreamWorks Animation, but it was good enough to be the second highest-grossing original film of the year.
DreamWorks Animation
