STUDIO SPOTLIGHT With no Phantom Menace to propel its grosses, Fox enjoyed a good year seeing as how its annual tally of $728.7M was off only 8% from 1999. With only a dozen releases, the studio got much mileage out of its players. Fox's heavyweights were the summer comic book smash X-Men and Christmas' Tom Hanks behemoth Cast Away, a co-production with DreamWorks. The mutant movie captured $157.3M domestically and about $300M worldwide while the desert island saga crashed through $145M in its first three weeks on its way to becoming one of the year's top grossing releases.

But Fox bet heavily on the animated feature Titan A.E. which crashed and burned with just $22.8M. And Leonardo DiCaprio's long-awaited return to cinemas in The Beach was greeted with a less-than-expected $39.8M although overseas markets kicked in an extra $103M. Martin Lawrence hit a career high with Big Momma's House which took in $117.6M, or about five times its cost. Fox's other summer comedy Me, Myself, and Irene reunited Jim Carrey with the Farrelly brothers and grossed $90.6M. Other moderate performers for the studio included Bedazzled, Men of Honor, Where the Heart Is, and Dude, Where's My Car?