Hollywood's 10 Most Successful On-Screen Pairings

Feb. 24, 2008— -- On-screen pairings are a fickle science. The right chemistry lulls audiences into buying even the most absurd plot lines. (Julia Roberts' hooker with a heart of gold in Pretty Woman comes to mind.) The wrong formulation (Bonfire of the Vanities, Gigli) guarantees box office lead.

While audiences may measure their favorite film duos with ineffable metrics like emotional resonance, even tears spilled, Tinseltown's bean-counters track performance in much more concrete terms: grosses. Hollywood's most successful film duos, as measured by their box office bang, are a mixed lot, including the leads of Tinseltown's highest-grossing film, a pair of animated children's toys and several iterations of the buddy-cop tag team.

In terms of box office gross, as provided by Box Office Mojo, the most successful film duo in history is Spider-Man's Toby Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. That big-budget franchise grossed $2.5 billion worldwide at the box office. (In all, it is believed to have cost nearly $600 million.) The original 2002 flick inspired the memorable kissing scene, in which Maguire's unmasked Spider-Man kissed Dunst's Mary Jane Watson upside down in the rain. "We wanted the audience to need them to be together for the picture to work," said Spider-Man director Sam Raimi in 2002. "When I saw Kirsten Dunst and Toby perform a scene together, they made that connection."

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Titanic minted superstars of its relatively unknown co-stars Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio. Their doomed love story wooed audiences to theaters for an unheard-of eight months. Titanic nabbed Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director and went on to gross $1.8 billion worldwide, more than any other film in history.

The cop action-comedy genre has produced some of cinema's most successful celluloid partnerships. Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, secret agents in 1997's Men in Black and the 2000 sequel, grossed over $1 billion together at the box office. Mel Gibson and Danny Glover, playing Los Angeles cops in the lucrative Lethal Weapon series, have generated a combined $955 million as on-screen partners. Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan round out Tinseltown's most successful police partners thanks to Rush Hour and its requisite sequels, which have grossed just under $850 million.