2011 in film

Evaluation of the year

Richard Brody of The New Yorker observed that the best films of 2011 "exalt the metaphysical, the fantastical, the transformative, the fourth-wall-breaking, or simply the impossible, and—remarkably—do so .... These films depart from 'reality' ... not in order to forget the irrefutable but in order to face it, to think about it, to act on it more freely". Film critic and filmmaker Scout Tafoya of RogerEbert.com considers the year of 2011 as the best year for cinema, countering the notion of 1939 being film's best year overall, citing examples such as Drive, The Tree of Life, Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, Keyhole, Contagion, The Adventures of Tintin, and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. He stated that "2011 housed not just some of the greatest art films of our age, but a revolution in the language of blockbuster filmmaking. One big-budget action film after another used digital cameras to show the world behind explosions in starker, stranger light, while constructing a backbone of classical ideas and images."

Highest-grossing films

These are the top-grossing films that were released in 2011.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides grossed $1,045,713,802, becoming the second film in the series to have grossed over $1 billion, and the 13th highest-grossing film of all time. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 grossed $1,341,511,219, becoming the third highest-grossing film of all time, the highest-grossing film in the Harry Potter franchise, and the highest of 2011 as a whole. In the USA and Canada, it set single-day and opening-weekend records, with $91,071,119 and $169,189,427 respectively. In addition, the film set a worldwide opening-weekend record with $483,189,427. Transformers: Dark of the Moon grossed $1,123,794,079 and is currently the seventh highest-grossing film of all time and the highest-grossing in the series.

2011 was the first year when three films grossed more than $1 billion worldwide, surpassing the previous year's record of two billion-dollar films, and also the first time when at least 10 films grossed more than $500 million worldwide (in 11th and 12th place, Puss in Boots and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows also earned over $500 million making it twelve films to do so).

Pirates of the Caribbean became the first franchise to have more than one film gross over a $1 billion, with On Stranger Tides joining 2006's Dead Man's Chest. On Stranger Tides also became the fifth film of the decade to surpass the billion-dollar milestone, breaking the previous record of four films (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest in 2006, The Dark Knight in 2008, and Avatar in 2009) during the 2000s.

Events

Film festival premieres

The following is a list of films that had their world premiere in 2011 in a film festival.