Up fantasy creek, without a paddle: what 2014's box office tells us

Biggest film of the year: Transformers: Age of Extinction.

Monkeys, raccoons and lizards clobbered the planet in 2014, helped by aliens, robots and fairies. It was not quite a terrible year for great films, but they just didn't stand a chance against the killer critters coming out of Hollywood or, to be accurate, out of large warehouses full of computers in Bangalore, Bristol, South Korea, Spain, China, Denmark or wherever the major special-effects houses set up their production facilities.

At least in that sense, the work gets shared around: thousands of worker bees around the world are now employed in the business of turning bad scripts into good money.

Cheerful: Australians' favourite film this year was The Lego Movie. Photo: AP

I have just spent an hour perusing the box office figures for 2014 and it is a depressing experience, from any angle. Not one of the top-10 movies at the box office, either worldwide or United States domestic, was a real-world story, in the sense of something that reflects the world we actually live in. Every film, on both indices, was a work of fantasy, if we define it widely.

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Guardians of the Galaxy, an adventure-comedy about space pirates fighting alien criminals, was the top film at the US box office, but only second on the international list. This was the film with the talking raccoon, and that might be why. What do the rest of us know about raccoons?

Worldwide, the biggest film of the year was Transformers: Age of Extinction, the fourth in a brain-melting series directed by Michael Bay, who brought us Bad Boys, Armageddon and Pain & Gain. What he doesn't know about dumbing down hasn't yet been discovered. Guardians was $US315 million ($387 million) behind, not even close. I realise a lot of children had Transformers toys as kids, but come on you're making us all suffer.

Real world: Ben Affleck as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl.

The next seven films in worldwide box office were Maleficent (with Angelina Jolie as the wicked witch from Cinderella), X-Men: Days of Future Past (a lot of good actors in silly costumes), Captain America: The Winter Soldier(ditto), The Amazing Spiderman 2 (rebooted, recast and regurgitated), Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (rebooted and re-energised, with a talking monkey), Interstellar (space explorers, but a good movie), How to Train Your Dragon 2 (funny animation) and The Hunger Games: MockingjayPart 1 (dystopian futurism).

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Up fantasy creek, without a paddle: what 2014's box office tells us