Want to know the best Julia Roberts movies? How about the worst Julia Roberts movies? Curious about Julia Roberts’ box office grosses or which Julia Roberts movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Julia Roberts movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information and much more.
Julia Roberts (1967-) was born in Smyrna, Georgia. She is a four time Oscar® nominated actress (Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman, and Erin Brockovich). Roberts won the Oscar® for her performance in Erin Brockovich. She is also a eight time Golden Globe® nominated actress. She has won the Golden Globe® three times (Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman and Erin Brockovich).
Her IMDb page shows over 70 acting credits since 1987. This page will rank Julia Roberts movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and movies that were not released in North American theaters were not included in the rankings.
When we first started writing movie web pages back in January 2011, the first pages we wrote were on my favorite two current actors, Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks, and on my wife’s favorite actress, Julia Roberts. Since then her page has moved to new website providers and has been updated many times over the years.
Julia Roberts Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Julia Roberts 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 Julia Roberts movies by co-stars of her movies
- Sort Julia Roberts movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Julia Roberts movies by adjusted worlwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Julia Roberts movies by 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 Julia Roberts movie received.
- Sort Julia Roberts movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Julia Roberts
1. Julia Roberts is the sister of actor Eric Roberts of Runaway Train and The Dark Knight fame. She is also the aunt of Emma Roberts of Nancy Drew, Scream 4 and We’re The Millers fame.
2. Julia Roberts has been named one of People magazine’s “50 Most Beautiful People in the World” a record tying eleven times.
3. Julia Roberts has a production company called Red Om Films. That is her husband, Daniel Moder, name spelled backwards.
4. One of Julia Roberts first television appearances was as a juvenile rape victim in the initial season of the series Crime Story in 1986.
5. Meg Ryan was initially under contract to play Shelby, the Julia Roberts role in Steel Magnolias, but the producers let her out of it to play Sally in When Harry Met Sally. It turned out well for both of them ….Harry was a huge hit for Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts got an Oscar nomination for playing Shelby.
6. The very next year Disney did not want to use Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman…..they instead wanted to use….you guessed it…. Meg Ryan in the role of Vivian. Daryl Hannah also turned down the role that would make Julia Roberts a household name.
7. Three of Julia Roberts biggest box office hits were directed by Garry Marshall….they were Pretty Woman, Runaway Bride and Valentine’s Day.
8. When Julia Roberts won the Academy Award® for best actress for her role as Erin Brockovich, she famously forgot to thank Brockovich in her acceptance speech. Afterward she was quoted as saying, “It doesn’t bring out the Einstein moment that you hoped it would.”
9. Movies Julia Roberts has turned down over the years….Sleepless in Seattle, Shakespeare in Love, The Blind Side, Godfather 3, While You Were Sleeping and Basic Instinct.
10. Check out Julia Roberts‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.
Check out Steve’s Julia Roberts You Tube Video
For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
Julia Roberts is among my top 5 favorite actresses of all-time and I’m in good company because 1/The Work Horse ranks her a high 3rd in his fine list of the 25 greatest female Legends 1950-2010 2/He credits her with a whopping adjusted career domestic gross of around $4.9 billion averaging out over 46 films at. $105 million per movie.
IMDB credits her with 60 acting awards and 102 noms and ranks her 42nd in its list of the 50 greatest movie actresses of all time Her reported net worth is $200 million.
Best POSTERS for me are 1/Ant Bully 2/two for Mirror, Mirror 3/Mary Reilly 4/American Sweethearts 5/Larry Crowne 6/Secret in their Eyes 7/Duplicity 8/Mystic Pizza 9/Flatliners 10/Charlotte’s Web 11/Osage County 12/Wonder 13/Michael Collins 14/ Pelican Brief 15/Ocean’s 11
Classy STILLS, my pick of which are 1/Mirror, Mirror 2/Valentine’s Day 3/Eat, Pray Love 4/Runaway Bride 5/The Mexican 6/Ocean’s 12 trio 7/Sleeping with the Enemy 8/Conspiracy Theory 9/Mona Lisa Smile 10/Mystic Pizza 11/Stepmom 12/Pelican Brief 13/two for pretty Woman 14/Ocean’s 11 – ah the Great George again!
I rated the Roberts video 97.5% You and WH have almost come to blows over ratings for this lady’s Top 6 best reviewed. Not only do you agree on only 3 of them but he treats your other 3 with disdain.
Steel Magnolias his 14th with 68%
Pretty Woman his 19th with 62%-is he pulling our leg?
Pelican Brief – his 20th with 61%
How dare he treat BOTH my Julia and my Denzel like that- I’m definitely backing you again over those last two! However I can forgive him for including in his 6 Gorgeous George’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind instead of Steel Magnolias – but I wonder what The Master would have made of the dichotomy between you and WH over your choices here?
Hi Bob, thanks for the review, generous rating, info and comparison, much appreciated.
Glad you liked the posters, stills and lobby cards.
Thanks for backing me up again, I blame Bruce’s sources for being so harsh on some really popular films. I’ve looked at one site he goes to – Metacritic – and their scoring system isn’t an accurate gauge for film rating. A film might have excellent scores from a bunch of critics and than a couple more might hate that film bringing the average score right down from say 70 to 50. So 50 remains their total for that film.
What I do with my rating system, and I’m giving away trade secrets here, is to look at all the various scores for a particular film and get a general idea where the final score is heading before I do my final calculations. For instance if a film is getting ratings between 6 and 8 from most of my sources and Leonard Maltin decides he didn’t like that film and gives it 2 out of 10, than I don’t include Maltin in the final calculation. Because it would unfairly impact the final score.
I do sometimes look at Bruce’s critics ratings as well before making a final decision on a film I’m not familiar with, so there is some influence from here too.
[Bruce punches air]
If I was Bruce I would go with the audience ratings at Metacritic and ignore the critic ratings, they are calculated far too low.
I think we can safely say that Julia Roberts is the most accomplished actress from the 6 ladies I’ve included so far in this recent run of videos. One of her underrated performances is as the battered and terrified wife of Patrick Bergin in Sleeping With the Enemy. An abusive monster who thinks nothing of punching and kicking his wife in the stomach when she forgets to do her chores. Patrick was so effective in the role that I think it adversely affected his film career.
There are no 10 or 9 scorers from Julia’s filmography, but there are 11 films scoring 8 out of 10 including – Erin Brockovich, Ocean’s 11, Steel Magnolias, Pretty Woman and Notting Hill. Nice juicy, chunky scores a long way from Bruce’s stingy sources. [Bruce growls] 😉
Top rated Julia film at IMDB is Ocean’s 11 and Erin Brockovich is no.1 at Rotten Tomatoes.
Julia on working with Meryl Streep “I’ve never seen anyone work harder than she does. She doesn’t just snap her fingers and be a genius. To work with Meryl Streep is a dream come come true for anyone. To know her is an honor. She is such a beautiful person and it was intimidating, certainly to be in these scenes with her. Choking her, and things like that, were not how I pictured it going in my mind all these years.”
“George Clooney is obsessed with Clive Owen. Every good-guy actor talks about Clive as one of their favourites. Because he’s English, because his successes have stood on the shoulders of his talents alone, and because he hasn’t been carried away by popular culture.”
“I’m just an ordinary person who has an extraordinary job.”
Thanks for the fpersonallyeedback, additional information and interesting quotes. But some of Bruce’s sources are “too harsh”? The Master too harsh? Now tell me the one about the three bears. What you are saying is that you treat the opinion that is badly out of line with all the rest as an “outlier” and you therefore ignore it.
Another Steve with whose work I’m acquainted does that too – Stephen Bush who writes for the UK New Statesman current affairs magazine and Stephen was the only journalist to initially correctly predict that Corbyn would get the Labour Party leadership.
HE was on that occasion the “outlier” among journalists but during the 2017 UK general election campaign when all the opinion polls were telling us that Mother Theresa would get a landslide majority, except one that correctly predicted that she would lose her existing majority, Stephen told us to ignore the latter as an outlier. As they say the rest is history.
feel have been the greatest box office attractions in the cinema’s Modern Era’ which the experts opine began in 1962, the Classic Era of Davis, Crawford, Gable, Cooper etc ending that year. The ranking positions I quote are the Work Horse’s in his chart.
Meryl Streep/1st
Julia Roberts/3rd
Julie Andrews/4th
Jane Fonda/8th
Barbra Streisand 10th
Sandra Bullock/12th
Angelina Jolie/20th
Goldie Hawn/24th
Cameron Diaz-excluded from WH Top 25 but strongly considered by him
Sigourney Weaver- same as Cameron.
I have drawn almost exclusively on WH’s box office figures in reaching my conclusions but relied on my own interpretations of the contribution that each actress personally made to those figures. Subjective I know, but mine own thing! You know what I think of current careers, like that of Jennifer Lawrence, which have apparently largely been spawned by franchises.
Thanks for the feedback, additional information and interesting quotes. But some of Bruce’s sources are “too harsh”? The Master is too harsh? Now tell me the one about the three bears. What you are saying is that you treat the opinion that is badly out of line with all the rest as an “outlier” and you therefore ignore it.
Another Steve with whose work I’m acquainted does that too – Stephen Bush who writes for the UK New Statesman current affairs magazine and Stephen was the only journalist to initially correctly predict that Corbyn would get the Labour Party leadership.
HE was on that occasion the “outlier” among journalists but during the 2017 UK general election campaign when all the opinion polls were telling us that Mother Theresa would get a landslide majority, except one that correctly predicted that she would lose her existing majority, Stephen told us to ignore the latter as an outlier. As they say the rest is history.
You know I concentrate on the top 6 of each of you when making comparisons but I have long had the impression that (1) you two are normally quite close in your top 6 and (2) where you ARE at odds about some of the Top 6, those about which you disagree are usually not too far outside both Top 6’s.
I am glad that you agree with me about Julia’s success story. Here, in the ranking order in which they appear in WH’s 25 Greatest Female Legends 1950-2010, are the 10 actresses whom I personally feel have been the greatest box office attractions in the cinema’s Modern Era’ which the experts opine began in 1962, the Classic Era of Davis, Crawford, Gable, Cooper etc ending that year. The ranking positions I quote are the Work Horse’s in his chart.
Meryl Streep/1st
Julia Roberts/3rd
Julie Andrews/4th
Jane Fonda/8th
Barbra Streisand/10th
Sandra Bullock/12th
Angelina Jolie/20th
Goldie Hawn/24th
Cameron Diaz-excluded from WH Top 25 but strongly considered by him
Sigourney Weaver- same as Cameron.
I have drawn almost exclusively on WH’s box office figures in reaching my conclusions but relied on my own interpretations of the contribution that each actress personally made to those figures. Subjective I know, but mine own thing! You know what I think of current careers, like that of Jennifer Lawrence, which have apparently largely been spawned by franchises.
‘Ignore the outlier’ should be my motto. 😉
Bob, when I first started rating the movies on my channel it was a fairly mechanical process, whatever the outcome I would slap an ‘average rating’ on the movie and send it out there. People started complaining of lower than usual scores for their favorite movies, particularly John (remember him?).
I started to feel that my ratings weren’t fair and lacked the ‘human touch’. And so I went back and updated a lot of those old videos, expanded them too. IMDB ratings from ordinary movie fans are just as important as the critics scores and make the final result more interesting. Plus there are so many obscure films that only get rated at IMDB and nowhere else on the net.
Thanks for the added info, who was no.2 on that female legends chart?
Diaz, Bullock and Jolie are coming up in this series of videos.
HI STEVE 1/Thanks for the additional explanations. I take your point about IMDB and the importance of the views of the man in the street. Indeed my beef with Joel’s sweeping statement that “nobody was interested in Brando’s Napoleon.” is that it ignored that the PUBLIC flocked to see Desiree and either Joel was ignorant of that fact or he considered their views didn’t count and that only the opinions of critics like himself did – ie the public were “nobodys”. To be fair to WH he does take account of public taste by publishing box office stats and they form part of his equations in allocating UMR scores For the most part Hirsch didn’t “do box office”.
2/No 2 on WH’s top 25 from 1950-2010 list is quite commendably Audrey Hepburn. However she didn’t make the list that I gave you because many of her main hits were in the Classic Era and her heyday, like that of Liz Taylor, effectively ended in 1967 so that both were box office stars for only a small part of the Modern era.
3/Of course my list relates purely to box office whereas WH’s one is based on much wider criteria. He would naturally argue that he reflects the “whole picture”!
4/I think it’s useful that you and WH do use different methods as it means that we regulars benefit from wider diversity of opinion – ie there’s room for both ways of rating the artistic quality of movies.
5/I do indeed remember John and in fact I have missed him.
6/I very much look forward to your Diaz, Bullock and Jolie videos. In the meantime take care and I hope you are having a good weekend.
Interesting thoughts on Julia Roberts, some of her bigger hits like Pelican Brief and her star making role in Pretty Woman. Also interesting is how Steve comes up with his review %. My response to some of Julia’s low UMR review percentages.
At first, I thought maybe my percentages are way out of whack due to the almost 10 years since originally researching these movies. Julia was the 3rd ever page written by me. That would have been in February or March of 2011. So I went back and re-checked my numbers. Of the main sources I use……First up – The Pelican Brief. The best result was at IMDb with a 6.6 score. Rotten Tomatoes lists it as a rotten movie with a 52%. Metacritic actually has it higher than Rotten Tomatoes. So even 8 years later it’s % is roughly the same. Our calculation uses just stats….we do not put our opinion in the equation. We did use some of our favorite critics like Maltin and Ebert.
As for Pretty Woman….yes it was a crowd pleaser…..and yes people really loved it when it first came out….but time has not been kind to this blockbuster. Today the movie seems horribly dated. Back when it was released…..it was labeled “more Garry Marshall tv crap on movie screens.” It became a blockbuster….but like many blockbusters….lots of people were not too impressed with the movie…..though Robert Ebert gave it a 3.5 star review.
So in conclusion…..there are lots of factors in our %……and we stand by our rankings. Personally I liked Pretty Woman, WoC loves Pretty Woman. I thought Pelican Brief was a decent movie but not one of their better movies.
I do have one question for Bob….I thought at one point (recently) you mentioned you had not seen The Pelican Brief. Good feedback from the two of you. Hope your weekend is going well….mine has been very busy…..the grandkids are in town this weekend….happy times!
HI BRUCE That got your early attention didn’t it! Some excellent points in your response and my further comments are as follows:
1/I am sorry if I confused you about The Pelican Brief. Because of my perception of its SUBJECT MATTER I had, and have, no interest in seeing it and was not passing judgement on its artistic worth but [tongue-in-cheek] was simply implying that as Steve’s high opinion of it benefited two of my own greatest idols I as the “man in the middle” preferred to come down on his side on this occasion. Maybe I should have made that clearer and thanks for giving me the opportunity to qualify my earlier comments. LESSON: Maybe I shouldn’t try so hard to “get you to draw” at times!
2/”Everything passes and everything changes,” sang Bob Dylan. In my opinion we should judge a film by how it was perceived within the culture of its day. You may feel Pretty Woman has dated badly – and I personally don’t: for me it’s still a charming film and it remains a joy to watch my Julia and Richard at the height of their powers and when they both looked so lovely – but many of today’s young people, even in their 30s and 40s, would in my experience say that even classics so beloved of the Joels and their like such as Al Leach’s His Girl Friday or my Jimmy’s Destry Rides Again are badly dated and it is likely that most of today’s generations would have no interest in watching them. Remember a survey many years ago of US university students found that half of those interviewed didn’t know who Gable was; heck for me it was like a kick where it would hurt me most when a group of young people I studied with didn’t know who The Great Mumbler was until somebody mentioned Godpop – “A Streetcar named WHAT?”; and I can’t see too many people today being terribly interested in Charlie Chaplin’s silent classics, but those films in their day deserved the high praise they got. LESSON: In defining which films deserve to be called “dated” we should maybe reach beyond the historians and critics and the self-opinionated movie buffs [like me!] and consult wider audiences.
3/CONCLUSION. I have said that I enjoy being privy to the assessments that both you and Steve provide under differing methods and it’s good to see neither of you “herding” in presenting your ratings. Yours truly knows what HE likes and is quite happy to be an “outlier” in his nostalgia for eg the usually not too highly rated B westerns of the 1950s –like Rufus Riker and that deck of cards in Shane there’s room for only so many Joels and Leonard Maltin’s on this planet. Therefore having said my piece and not usually personally getting myself involved with the statistical rating of films, I think that like Greg in The Big Country I’ll step aside and let the Charles Bickford and Burl Ives of the two sites blast h**l out of each other if they wish! LESSON: Maybe Ole Bob should in future simply average out the Work Horse/Mr Posters ratings and take the result as the definitive marking! After all if I may paraphrase one of my idols “I come here to praise Lensman and Cogerson and to bury only Hirschhorn!”
Added Steve’s Julia Roberts video to our Julia page. Our thoughts found on his YouTube channel.
“Thanks to the influence of WoC, I have seen every single one of these movies. On our website she was our 3rd ever subject….only Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks got UMR pages before her. My favorites would be #14 conspriracy Theory…fun Mel role, #13 My Best Friend’s Wedding…fun movie and #4 Notting Hill…which is one that I watch on a regular basis..with WoC of course. WoC’s favorite is number 5 Pretty Woman….which is in her all time Top 10…. think it is alright. Roberts movies that not her favorites….#28 The Mexican..what a waste of a great cast, #17 Closer..a quartet of unlikable people and #32 Eat Pray Love or Slow Moving Junk. Voted up and shared.”
Part 2: ” Hope doing this video was not too painful for you….I know how much Julia means to you. Added comment….two of her movies did not make my first comment….I thought both American Sweethearts and Ocean’s Eleven are good movies….but feel they could have been so much better. Her part in Ocean’s Eleven is the weakest element of the movie,,,in my humble opinion.”
Bruce, I’m shocked that you’ve seen every one of these movies! Even Julia Roberts hasn’t seen every one of these movies!
My tally 21 (still too many!) and Flora 7. The first Danny Ocean movie in this trilogy was good, saw it in the cinema, the second was terrible and third was a step up thanks to the presence of Al Pacino. I wasn’t that crazy about the original Sinatra edition but it’s in the collection. Thanks for the comment, vote and share, much appreciated.
My mom and I saw Ben is Back tonight. Our favorite, Julia is outstanding, but neither of us liked the movie. I guess it is too early for it to be ranked here.
1 Julia Roberts is one of my own personal favourite actresses of all time so for me this a valuable update. Julia’s own idol is apparently Meryl Streep and she says that she wept joyfully when she learned that she would be making August Osage County with Meryl.
2 There was a time when Julia was Box Office gold and could churn out hit after hit but her last 4 films have earned a paltry 133 mil in total adjusted domestic grosses which averages about 33 mil per movie.
3 Indeed it has been 6 years since she had a flick which crashed through the Cogerson domestic 100 mil barrier – Valentine’s Day which was an ensemble picture. The ‘Ocean’ films were also ensemble and she was just a voice in Charlotte’s Web so it could be argued that you would have to go back to 2001 for a proper Roberts stand-alone picture that made an adjusted 100 mil in domestic gross in the Cogerson tables.
4 Nevertheless in her heyday she was in my view one of the few modern performers in the box office league of feminine stars of yesteryear such as Doris Day and Liz Taylor. Indeed when worldwide grosses are taken into account there would probably not be many classic era actresses who could match Julia’s box office record; because as Bruce’s figures have repeatedly demonstrated in the old days foreign revenues tended to be generally a good deal lower than domestic grosses whereas Julia’s overseas takings actually slightly exceed even her large domestic grosses.
5 Also because of the time frame in which her movies were made it is likely that only box office giants such as Duke the King and Jimmy Stewart among the men would match the PURCHASING POWER in today’s dollars of Julia Roberts’ worldwide grosses
Hey Bob.
1. In the end…they both got Oscar nominations for August Osage County…so not only did she get to work with Streep…now their roles will be remembered evenmore.
2. Sadly she seems to be yet another actress to fall under the “curse of 39″….if you look at her career after 2006…it is not too impressive.
3. Wow….2001…..that is a long time ago….but I agree with your logic.
4. I agree with you….on my Top 25 actresses of 1950-2010…I have listed at #3….behind her idol…Streep and Audrey Hepburn. Her run from 1988 to 2001 was very impressive.
5. On the update…I left off the worldwide grosses…and went with the yearly ranking totals instead.
6. Good stats on her purchasing power. As always thanks for sharing your movie knowledge.
1 As you suggest Julia unfortunately seems to be another actress whose career is substantiating the findings of W o C’s survey.
2 However a star don’t exactly increase the odds of reviving her box office career when she appears in a film with the awkward title of Money Monster.
3 For me it’s one of the most unappealing film titles that I’ve ever known for an A film. Indeed it sounds like the kind of second rate horror film that Bela Lugosi would have appeared in ages ago. We used to have titles like that all the time for trash movies and mundane serials like The Purple Monster Strikes.
4 Nice though that as you say your own Top 25 Actress Table [1950-2010] supports my view of Julia as one of those actresses that could ‘open’ a film in her heyday.
BOB
Hey Bob….I agree Money Monster did not capture the attention of movie audiences….though at this point in her career….she might have been happy with the movie earning over $40 million. No matter what happens in the future…her legacy is set….she has been one of the greatest actresses of the last 60 years. Thanks for the return comment…it is greatly appreciated.
Stopping by to visit one of my favorite actresses and getting a link for my page! Thanks cogerson!:)
Hey Sunshine thanks for the link…..glad to see you again.