Based on the above examples, I'm guessing they mean internal transformation and physical metamorphosis. Captain America starts out weedy and unfit for military service, the ends up buff and tough.

The right side is mis-labeled, isn't it? There's no indication of the % of budget recovered anywhere. This is a list of the highest profit ranked in order. And using the film's production budget is only half the story (or less). People don't go see movies they've never heard of. So there's advertising and marketing costs. Those amounts are impossible to get ahold of, but you can probably figure Insidious cost at least 20 million more. That cuts into profit. As far as budget and profitability goes, a chart like this can lead you astray. If you were to have made Insidious for $250 million dollars, you wouldn't have made $20.5 billion dollars around the world. You might draw some conclusion about the upper earning range for a small budget film, though. Since foreign market is huge today, it's an oversight that this chart doesn't address this in any way (maybe you need two charts). Compare Insidious to Transformers. Insidious's box office was 55% domestic, while Transformers generated 68% of its box office from overseas. If you're trying to make money everywhere, movies like Insidious don't pay off. You probably need to make an Insidious for different parts of the world (and at 1.5 million, making the same movie for various overseas markets could be a decent strategy. You could make a lot of Insidiouses, each targeted, and have a shot at generating the same total return as Transformers).