These days, it feels like every summer a new sequel, prequel, or yet another movie is being added to an already bloated franchise. So it makes sense that several purists are using the term franchise fatigue more often and wondering why a movie can’t just be a movie. It’s a reasonable enough question to ask, given that a handful of standalone blockbusters, like the five on this list, have proven time and again that a movie doesn’t need a franchise to become an event.
None of these movies needed a shared universe, a post-credits tease, or a decade of setup to pull in the numbers they did. They just showed up, dominated the box office and the awards conversation, then let the rest of popular culture catch up. Here’s how each one pulled off an event status with nothing but a strong title and a two-hour runtime to sell.
1. Independence Day (1996)
Ask any film lover who grew up in the 1990s for the first image that comes to mind when they hear “blockbuster,” and most would probably picture the White House getting blown up by an alien death ray in Roland Emmerich‘s Independence Day. That single shot did more advertising than any trailer could. More telling is the fact that this was an original screenplay by Emmerich. There’s no comic book or built-in fan base, but the movie still raked in $817 million worldwide against a $75 million budget.
That budget is significantly smaller than what it costs to make most Marvel movies today. Will Smith’s Captain Steven Hiller got the punchlines, and President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) delivered the speech that’s been parodied more times than anybody can count. The sequel came out 20 years too late, in most fans’ opinion, and didn’t exactly fail. It’s just not remembered as fondly as the original, which stood quite well on its own.
2. Inception (2010)
Fans still argue about whether that spinning top falls at the end of Inception, and that debate might be the best free marketing a movie ever got. Christopher Nolan built the whole thing around a crew sneaking through nested dreams to plant ideas instead of stealing one, with Dom Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) leading the job. Most people needed to watch it more than once just to keep the dream levels straight, and that confusion became half the fun. Warner Bros. spent about $160 million to make the movie and got back nearly $840 million worldwide, making Inception the fourth highest-grossing film of 2010. The film earned eight Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture, at the 2011 Oscars. It won four: visual effects, cinematography, sound editing, and sound mixing.
3. Gravity (2013)
Sandra Bullock’s Dr. Ryan Stone spent the whole of Gravity trying not to die in space, and that made for one of the tensest 91 minutes ever filmed. Alfonso Cuarón shot that intense fight to survive in these long, unbroken takes, with Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) drifting alongside her through the wreckage. The movie cost $100 million, which is nothing by blockbuster standards, and still made $723 million worldwide.
That’s serious money for something with no superheroes or aliens attached. The Academy agreed by handing it 10 nominations, and it won seven, including Best Director for Cuarón, who became the first Latino filmmaker to win that category. There’s no obvious sequel because the movie ends with Dr. Stone finally touching solid ground again. What are they gonna do, send her back up?
4. Interstellar (2014)
Christopher Nolan asked moviegoers to sit through three hours of black holes, time dilation, and a talking robot named TARS, and they really did. Of course, a movie like that split critics right down the middle. Some called the ending too sentimental, while others called it Nolan’s most ambitious swing yet. In the movie, Cooper (Matthew McConaughey), a widowed NASA pilot, leaves his daughter Murph (Jessica Chastain, once she’s grown) behind to save humanity.
That heart-wrenching storyline pushed the movie past $700 million worldwide, once re-releases were counted. It also earned five Oscar nominations, winning Best Visual Effects. The real secret weapon was Kip Thorne, a Caltech physicist who worked out the black hole math so accurately that real scientists still cite the movie in actual research papers.
5. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)
Queen hadn’t released new music in years, and Freddie Mercury had been dead since 1991 when Bohemian Rhapsody was released in 2018. Regardless, this biopic pulled in more money than most superhero movies released that year. The budget was smaller than what some studios spend on marketing alone, and the late Mercury would probably get a kick out of knowing that a little biopic about his own life managed that.
Rami Malek channels that same strutting, mic-swinging bravado, prosthetic teeth and all. And yeah, early reviews were tough, but by the time the Live Aid scene towards the end of the movie hits, even the skeptics tend to come around. The movie won four Oscars in 2019, including Best Actor for Malek. It lost Best Picture to Green Book, which is a whole other conversation.
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