1938 Top Grossing Movies

Errol Flynn in The Adventures of Robin Hood

This movie page looks at 1938 Top Grossing Movies Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1938 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 33,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1938 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1938.  Obviously many movies made in 1937 earned box office dollars in 1938.  On the other side many movies made in 1938 made money in 1939 and later.  This page will looks at 125 1938 Top Grossing Movies.  The movies are listed in a massive table that lets you rank the movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information.

The following massive table only includes the movies made in 1938 that are in our database.  Since we are constantly adding new movies to our database….this page will quickly become obsolete.  We will try and update this page on a regular basis.

Clark Gable & Myrna Loy in Test Pilot…a Best Picture Oscar nominee

Our UMR Top 50 of 1938

1938 Top Grossing Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort 1938 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1938 Top Grossing Movies by domestic actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1938 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1938 Top Grossing Movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each 1938 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1938 Top Grossing Movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking Score (UMR).  Our UMR score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

Katharine Hepburn & Cary Grant in Bringing Up Baby

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: Variety Magazine – January 6th 1943

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions – 1941,1942,1947,1954,1961,1968,1971,1974

Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1942 by Tino Balio

Source 6: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon

Source 7:  Wikipedia

Source 8:  IMDb.com

Source 9:  “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy

Source 10: Hollywood Power Stats by Christopher Reynolds


My Yearly Review Pages

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.

33 thoughts on “1938 Top Grossing Movies

  1. The Girls of The Golden West (1938) and The Girl of the Golden West (1938)
    This is the same film with a typo, isn’t it.

    All this data has been a great find, btw. Thanks for all these pages.

    1. Hey Peace……yep…that was a typo…and it is in the process of getting fixed. Good catch…and thanks for the compliment on our yearly review pages…..it was a long process to do all these years…but it was worth the effort. Thanks for stopping by.

Leave a Reply to Dan Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.