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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