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Sat 29 August 2026 3:30, UK
If you and your friends were putting together a list of the top 15 highest-grossing movie actors in all of cinema history, it’s fair to say you would be at it a long, long time before someone piped up to say ‘Oh wait, what about Mark Ruffalo?’
His is not a name that really seems to sit alongside stars like Tom Hanks or Zoe Saldaña or Tom Cruise, but it is indeed a fact, and Ruffalo has pulled in a staggering $9.9billion in total box office takings over the years, enough to put him on that list with some of the real household A-listers.
Of course, the driving reason for it is the Marvel Cinematic Universe, under whom, as the Incredible Hulk (or Dr Bruce Banner when he’s feeling a bit calmer and has had a decent breakfast), Ruffalo is an Avenger after all, and those films are absolute beasts, occupying four spots in the most popular 20 movies of all time, including the second ever after James Cameron’s mystifyingly enduring Avatar.
And while he hasn’t got a spin-off movie along the lines of Captain America or Thor, he does have the fortunate happenstance to be involved in the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, and the latest of those is a blockbuster and no mistake. The fourth film since Holland slipped on the spidey suit, Brand New Day has surpassed all expectations, immediately becoming the fifth highest-grossing film in history and showcasing just how good Ruffalo is at trying his best to be a nerd but inevitably going all green and angry and smashing buildings up.
It slots neatly into his incredibly impressive near-40-year CV, which packs in some quite brilliant films, including Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, David Fincher’s Zodiac, Poor Things, Spotlight, and two films, Scorsese’s Shutter Island and The Kids are Alright, which was released in 2010, a year that was pivotal for him in many ways.
Not only did he win the first of his four Oscar nominations for the latter movie, but he also made his directing debut with a film called Sympathy for Delicious, a movie written by his wheelchair-bound best friend about a paralysed DJ who starts to investigate faith healing. Although it had a cast full of well-known names, including Orlando Bloom, Laura Linney and Juliette Lewis, to say it didn’t make an impact on release would be an understatement, bringing in a total box office earnings of just under $14k.
Perhaps that contributed to the fact that it remains the only time Ruffalo has stepped behind the camera to direct, although it may also be because he encountered several challenges while filming. The mix of religious fervour and live music certainly didn’t help, with the actor explaining, “The story and the people are fantastical, and I did think the film could go off the rails. First of all, you have a band with real music which 95% of the time ruins a movie because it’s hard to capture that.”
Further reading: Cutting Room Floor
He added, “Then you have all this fantastic healing stuff, and we could have done the lights flickering, but I felt I should strip it back. I wanted to make it as honest as possible. But it was walking the razor’s edge, and it could have gone one way or another.”
It didn’t go well, but then if you don’t try things, then you’ll never know. It definitely didn’t do his career any harm whatsoever, and the next year he started filming the first Avengers movie, the 2012 smash that went on to provide him with global success for many years to come.
