This was a year of high anticipation: franchises staked at both ends of 2012, a crossover with "Harry Potter" implications, and a summer stuffed with superheroes in spandex to shake up box-office doldrums.
Could hype measure up to expectation -- and did it deliver in 2012? One good way to measure is to stack up movies' buzz -- in this case, the number of Searches on Yahoo!, visited by a half a billion people each month, during each film's debut month -- against its critical reviews and box-office receipts. One thing to note: Hollywood-hyped titles like "John Carter" and "Battleship" weren't fooling audiences; they knew to save their online energy for bigger things.
[Photos: 2012 Breakout Stars]


