RANKED: The 50 most successful movies of 2015

Samantha Lee/Business Insider

Hundreds of movies come out every year, but only a fraction become hits. Business Insider decided to rank the most successful movies of 2015 based on global box office performance, critics reviews, and fan ratings.

We started with a group of the 150 highest-grossing films of the past year through the weekend ending Dec. 20 - culled from Box Office Mojo - and then subtracted their production budget to arrive at a box office profit figure. We also compiled critic ratings from review aggregator Metacritic (scale: 0-100) and fan ratings from IMDB (scale: 0-10). We combined these three metrics by taking their geometric mean and ranking the movies based on that composite score. We included some films on our list that technically opened in 2014, as their wide-release box office run took place primarily in 2015.

Our top 50 grossed a combined $19 billion worldwide at the box office. Many were reboots or extensions of a franchise, including Vin Diesel's action blockbuster "Furious 7," which claimed the top spot thanks to strong reviews from fans and critics as well as an expectations-shattering $1.3 billion box-office profit worldwide.

With only one weekend under its belt, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" vaulted to No. 9 after a record-breaking $529 million opening weekend; it will likely ascend higher in the final days of 2015.

Read on to see the 50 most successful films of 2015.