Annual top 10 lists are stupid and easy and boring and no one likes them. On this blog, we try to track the path of movies over time, so instead of blindly stating what we liked and disliked about 2014 movies, we’re going to dig a little deeper and examine 10 movies that are important to the future of the art form and what their impact might be.
1) Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones
“The producers of Paranormal Activity” have ruled horror for seven years now, for better or worse. Insidious, Sinister, Dark Skies and Oculus have all born the moniker as their primary selling point, none matching the quality of their namesake — until Oculus, which also came out this year.
Most of these movies don’t make huge splashes. Oculus grossed $44 million. Sinister took in $77.7 million and Dark Skies took in only $26.4 million. But the endless stream of Paranormal Activity and Insidious movies, sixth and third installments of which are due this year, continue to constantly break $150 million without any trouble.
Until The Marked Ones, that is. The fifth movie in the series, dumped unceremoniously on the first weekend in January, became the first Paranormal Activity movie not to break $100 million, clocking out with a lifetime gross of $90.9 million. It’s difficult to say this is any kind of a blow — the real innovation in these movies are how cheap they are to make. Even this throw-away represents a 1,718 percent return-on-investment. But these same people have been making the same scary movie for almost a decade now, and any potential for the genre opening to new ideas again is significant.
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