2021 in film

2021 in film is an overview of events, including the highest-grossing films, award ceremonies, festivals, a list of country-specific lists of films released, and movie programming.
== Evaluation of the year ==
In his article highlighting the best movies of 2021, Richard Brody of The New Yorker said, "From an artistic perspective, 2021 has been an excellent cinematic vintage, yet the bounty is shadowed by an air of doom. The reopening of theatres has brought many great movies—some of which were postponed from last year—to the big screen, but fewer people to see them. The biggest successes, as usual, have been superhero and franchise films. The French Dispatch has done respectably in wide release, and Licorice Pizza is doing superbly on four screens in New York and Los Angeles, but few, if any, of the year’s best films are likely to reach high on the box-office charts. The shift toward streaming was already under way when the pandemic struck, and as the trend has accelerated it’s had a paradoxical effect on movies. On the one hand, a streaming release is a wide release, happily accessible to all (or to all subscribers). On the other, an online release usually registers as a nonevent, and many of the great movies hardly make a blip on the mediascape despite being more accessible than ever."
== Highest-grossing films ==
Highest-grossing films of 2021
Rank	Title 	Distributor 	Worldwide gross
1 	Avatar: The Way of Water 	Paramount / Fox	$2,320,250,281
2 	Spider-Man: No Way Home 	Paramount 	$1,912,233,593
3 	Encanto 	Disney 	$1,242,805,359
4 	Jurassic World Dominion 	Universal 	$1,003,700,664
5 	Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness	Paramount 	$955,775,804
6 	The Batman 	Warner Bros. 	$770,962,583
7 	The Matrix Resurrections 	Warner Bros. 	$739,412,035
8 	Paw Patrol: The Movie 	Paramount 	$604,460,538
9 	Luca 	Disney 	$569,626,289
10 	Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings 	Paramount 	$432,243,292