Sequels and spin-offs made up nine of the top 10 films at the UK and Irish box office last year, figures show.
Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water led the boom in movies that were sequels or part of long-running franchises.
The only independent film to appear in the top 10 is the Elvis biopic, which scraped into 10th place.
The figures, released by the British Film Institute (BFI), show the franchise films that are always on the big screen.
A sequel or spin-off has topped the box office chart every year since 2010, with one exception: 2020, when many blockbusters were postponed due to the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving the way clear for the First World War epic Put 1917 first. place.
Topping the chart in 2022 was Top Gun: Maverick, which took a massive £83.7 million at the UK and Irish box office – enough to make it one of the top 10 films of all time.
The film sees Tom Cruise reprising the role of pilot Pete “Maverick” Mitchell, which he first played 36 years earlier in 1986’s Top Gun.
Second film Avatar: The Way of Water (£70.9 million) another long-awaited sequel, this time coming 13 years after the original, but again using cutting edge technological effects to mix live action and digital animation .
In third place is Minions: The Rise of Gru (£47.0 million), which came out seven years after the first Minions film.
Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (£42.2 million) is fourth in the chart, followed by The Batman (£40.8 million), Thor: Love and Thunder (£37.6 million), Jurassic World: Dominion (£35.1 million) , Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (£34.2 million) and Sing 2 (£33.0 million).
Two of the films in the top 10 are still in general release – The Way of Water and Wakanda Forever – so could see their overall box office rise even higher.
The best performing independent film last year was Belfast, written and directed by Kenneth Branagh, which took £15.6 million.
All box office data covers receipts up to January 29, 2023, and includes Ireland as well as the UK, as both are counted as one territory for reporting purposes.
Separate figures from the BFI show that total UK cinema admissions for all films released in 2022 were 117 million.
This is up 59% on 2021, but is 33% lower than 2019’s pre-pandemic total of 176 million.
Factors likely to have affected admissions last year included a record summer heatwave and the Queen’s death and funeral in September, the BFI said.