Typically, one might expect a correlation between box office numbers and the most searched movie wikis of the year. And yet, you won’t find Barbie or The Super Mario Bros. Movie present on this list of the Fandom movie-based wikis that were the most popular this year — though keep your eyes on our list of the Biggest Post-Release Movie Wiki Jumps of 2023 soon! — despite being the only films in 2023 to draw more than $1 billion globally.
What you will find, however, are wikis that contain multitudes; rich franchises or studios with histories and lore to get lost in or fawn over. Box-office numbers capture a moment in time, the reaction to a film in its earliest days, while Wikis often offer a different metric: the amount of space a particular movie or franchise takes up in one’s mind, until we are left with no choice but to do a deep-dive to learn everything we can about it. And so, the most visited movie wikis of 2023 by you, the Fandom readers.
Despite a comparatively quiet, or at least rebuilding, year in the world of Pixar, the famed animation studio nevertheless cracked the top ten for 2023, likely thanks to its impressive catalog of evergreen masterpieces — and the announcement of a new Toy Story movie.
Pixar’s one big new release of the year was Elemental, a visually stunning but light-on-A-listers animated adventure that was slow to get rolling in the box-office, but eventually managed to rack up nearly half a billion as the movie-going public caught on to its appeal thanks to word of mouth. In the process, it began to restore some luster to Pixar as a box office draw, after multiple movies went straight to Disney+ and 2022’s Lightyear bombed.
Though Xenopedia dipped a few placements from where it ranked last year, the shared world of Alien and Predator has continued to be on the forefront of fans everywhere. The shadow of 2022’s excellent Prey looms large as it finally received a physical media release in 2023, while fans eagerly anticipate Fede Álvarez’s film Alien: Romulus, slated for release August 16, 2024. As if that weren’t enough, there’s also been a steady drip of information, like xenomorph acid leaking through the ceiling, about Noah Hawley’s Alien TV series set 30 years before the events of the original film.
But the films and impending TV show are likely not the only reason for Xenopedia’s presence in the Top 10 Movie Wikis for this year: Marvel Comics launched new, acclaimed comic book series for both Alien and Predator, while Focus Entertainment published the real-time strategy game Aliens: Dark Descent. Like a xenomorph locked inside a space cruiser with a bunch of unsuspecting grunts, Alien and Predator fans have eaten well this year.
Is there a Hunger Games franchise without Katniss Everdeen? When The Hunger Games: Mockingjay — Part 2 released in 2015, it felt likely that the answer was no. But Fandom readers in 2023—not to mention moviegoers—have proven otherwise.
Based on Suzanne Collins’ prequel novel of the same name, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes returns viewers—as well as predominant franchise director Francis Lawrence—to the world of Panem some 64 years before Katniss entered the games to reveal the trajectory of Coriolanus Snow from teen orphan to tyrannical president.
There’s certainly no shortage of Panem history to lose hours brushing up on, and with The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, ahem, catching fire at the box office and proving to have great holds week to week, perhaps it’s no surprise that this popular franchise is back on readers’ minds in a bigger way, impressively making it into our ten most popular movie wikis of 2023 after placing outside the top ten for several years.
Despite no theatrical release since 2019 and the anticipated live-action version still a few years away, readers are bounding to the How to Train Your Dragon Wiki in droves thanks to an influx of exciting news about the franchise.
Up-and-comers Mason Thames and Nico Parker were announced as Hiccup and Astrid, respectively, in the live-action rendition, while Universal Studios Orland’s Epic Universe continued construction, where How to Train Your Dragon is slated to be one of the featured areas for fans to live out their dragon-training dreams in full. Plus, the popular animated series Dragons: The Nine Realms dropped three (!) seasons in 2023, undoubtedly keeping this beloved world of Hiccup, Toothless, and their pals at the forefront of young minds.
It helps that the franchise is powered by an immensely popular series of novels—12 in total—that offer a rich tapestry that allows readers to get lost for hours reading up on lore and backstory of the characters they love.
Maybe it’s just that folks are still trying to decipher the plot of Jurassic World: Dominion, or perhaps it’s just that dinosaurs, like the little black dress, never go out of style. It could be that it was the original film’s 30th anniversary and Universal reunited the original cast from some retrospective videos. Or it was news on a second animated series, Jurassic World: Chaos Theory, coming to Netflix, following the conclusion of Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous. Whatever the case—probably a mixture of all of the above—the Jurassic Park Wiki is still going strong, with readers flocking to it like so many Gallimimus.
Even though the movies have concluded—for now, anyway—it’s possible dino fiends are still riding the wave thanks to the die-hard fandom of the Jurassic World: Evolution video games, or perhaps even getting a last-minute boost thanks to the announcement of Jurassic Park: Survival at the recently held Game Awards 2023. For a franchise that for all intents and purposes should be on its way to extinction, like life, it finds a way.
A series like Lord of the Rings is the reason Wikis exist. The lore is so complex, so complete, that a reader could spend days reading and barely scratch the surface. Thanks to The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power releasing last year, J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantasy epic is back at the forefront of thought—and it probably helps that Warner Bros. announced this year that there are plans for future live-action theatrical releases in the franchise, not to mention a new December 13, 2024 release date for the previously announced animated feature, The Lord of the Rings: The War of the Rohirrim.
That doesn’t necessarily mean retreading the past, either, so perhaps readers are digging for clues on what the new films could be. Peter Jackson’s adaptations cover Tolkien’s Third Age of Middle-earth and Rings of Power tackles the Second, so perhaps they’ll go back to the Spring of Arda, before even the Elves had awakened on Middle-earth. Or perhaps a story set around Dagor Dagorath, Tolkien’s version of Ragnarok.
See? It’s easy to get sucked in.
“The Marvel Cinematic Universe is stale,” they said. “Superhero fatigue is settling in,” they said. Whatever the box-office might be reflecting in terms of the public’s tolerance for an avalanche of superhero movies, reader interest in the MCU has yet to waver. In partial thanks to the start of Marvel Studios’ Phase Five, including the release of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (a very well received hit film among two notably poor performers after so many successes), and The Marvels, and likely owing an even greater debt to the return of the incredibly popular Tom Hiddleston as Loki in the eponymous show’s second season, the MCU Wiki is still being crawled constantly.
It’ll be interesting to see how the MCU fares in the year to come, with Disney seemingly course-correcting a bit on some perceived missteps and the evolving habits of its viewers, but building an intricate decade-plus of story is no small feat, and interest will surely never wane for many true believers.
It’s worth noting that Disney not only has its own subset of die-hard fans who are willing to dive deep on its massive Wiki web, but it also owns properties that land in four other spots on this list: Pixar, Alien/Predator, the MCU, and (spoilers for the #1 spot) Star Wars. That means Disney dominates a whopping 50% of Fandom’s Top 10 Movie Wikis.
Leaving behind the Marvel and Star Wars of it all, the classic Disney brand itself went all-out for its 100th anniversary celebration with in-depth looks at its history in projects like the short Once Upon a Studio that no doubt sparked renewed interest in the back catalog. Plus, though there box office results were shaky at best, Disney had multiple tentpole releases like The Little Mermaid, The Haunted Mansion, and Wish, not to mention films from its subsidiaries like Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, The Boogeyman, and A Haunting in Venice.
Anyway you slice the pie, Disney’s got a big ol’ piece of it, including here on Fandom.
A stalwart of Fandom’s Wiki pages, the Harry Potter Wiki placed even higher than last year, even though 2022 featured the theatrical release of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore. Something even more magical came along in 2023: the hotly anticipated Hogwarts Legacy, the first truly in-depth video game experience that puts the player into the robes of a Hogwarts student. Only a few months after its release in February 2023, the game had already sold over 15 million copies. The galleons Hogwarts Legacy raked in could buy every enrolled student a Firebolt, that’s for sure.
Adding to the everpresent Wizarding World hype was Warner Bros.’ reveal of its intention to produce a new television series adapting the bestselling books, slated for a debut in 2025. Despite his story being long since completed, it seems the Boy Who Lived has no intention of dying out.
In a year that blasted off with Season 2 of The Bad Batch and wound down with the debut of the hotly anticipated Ahsoka Season 1—with Grogu and The Mandalorian Season 3 sandwiched in the middle—the chances of the Star Wars Wiki, aka Wookieepedia, not cementing its place at the top of the pile were about as slim as successfully navigating an asteroid field.
It’s been another busy year for Star Wars and despite no theatrical releases since 2019, the announcements of three new movies during Star Wars Celebration — including the return of Daisy Ridley as Rey, James Mangold jumping from the world of Indiana Jones to Star Wars, and Dave Filoni tying up threads of the Mando timeline — got people buzzing once more. It seems fans are just as eager to gobble up lore from a galaxy far, far away whether it comes on the big screen or the one in their living rooms.
With the increasing interconnectivity between the films and the Disney+ shows, it makes sense that viewers tuning into Ahsoka who may not have the full breadth of the character’s history would jump into Wookieepedia to fill in some gaps from Star Wars: The Clone Wars or learn more about new live-action additions Hera, Sabine, and Ezra from Star Wars: Rebels.
Throw in the 2023 release of Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, the well-reviewed new installment to the blockbuster gaming franchise, and you’ve got a recipe for a Wiki more popular than blue milk.
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