Top 100 Musicals

Sittin' on top of rankings is Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain
Sittin’ on top of rankings is Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain when looking at critic and audience rankings

Want to know the best Top 100 Musicals movies?  How about the worst Top 100 Musicals movies?  Curious about Top 100 Musicals box office grosses or which Top 100 Musicals movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Top 100 Musicals 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 alot more.

Over the years we have received many requests to do UMR pages on genres.  Besides doing a Sports movie page we have pretty much ignored those requests.  We ignored those requests because we could not figure out a way to put together a page on a whole genre. Recently we stumbled across a book called Musicals by Daniel Cohen.  In that book Cohen looked at the best of the best musicals from the 1920s to the mid 1980s.  At the end of the book was a filmography of all the movies in his book.  That seemed like a great starting point for us to finally do a UMR page on musicals. Here are rules we used when putting together this page.

(1) If Cohen listed the movie in his book…the movie made the page. (2) Although we are not really huge musical movie fans….a few of the musicals we actually like….did not make his book.  So we added our favorite musicals like Paint Your Wagon (Clint singing…. how did that not make the book?) and The Rocky Horror Picture show.  (3) Then we included movie musicals made after Cohen’s book was published.  (4) We did not include Biopics.  Yes movies like The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner’s Daughter and La Bamba have lots of music but almost all of it occurs on a stage or in a studio.  (5) We also did not include album movies like Purple Rain and Pink Floyd’s The Wall or most of the Disney animated classics….with the exception of Beauty and The Beast which was on every Best Musical Movie list we saw(6) In the end we actually ended up with way more than 100 movies….279 to be precise.  So since we researched them….we figured we would include them.  (7) Can’t find a musical on the table?  If it was before 1984….it is not our fault….you have to blame Daniel Cohen.  If the movie is made after 1984….then we will take the blame.  BUT….leave a comment detailing the missing movie…..and we will include it.  Enjoy!

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are well represented in this collection of Top 100 Musicals….13 Rogers movies made the list and 27 Astaire movies made the list.

Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movies by the stars of the movies
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by actual domestic box office grosses
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movie received.
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the search and sort button to make this table very interactive.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Top 100 Musicals Table

  1. 194 Top 100 Musicals movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 69.53% of his movies listed. The Sound of Music (1965) was the biggest box office hit.
  2. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  224 of Top 100 Musicals’s movies are rated as good movies…or 80.28% of his movies.  Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the highest rated movie while At Long Last Love (1975) is lowest rated movie.
  3. 168 Top 100 Musicals movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 60.21% of his movies.
  4. 66 Top 100 Musicals movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 23.65% of his movies.
  5. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 235 Top 100 Musicals movie scored higher that average….or 84.22% of his movies. West Side Story (1961) got the the highest UMR Score while At Long Last Love (1975) got the lowest UMR Score.
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30

Possibly Interesting Facts About Top 100 Musicals

1. The combined adjusted domestic box office gross for these 279 movies is $48.67 BILLION!

2. The 279 movies on this table received 573 Oscar® nominations.

3. The 279 movies on this table won 146 Oscars®.

4. 34 of these movies received Best Picture Oscar® nominations

5. 8 of these movies won the Best Picture Oscar®.

6.  The Great Ziegfeld (1936), An American in Paris (1951), Gigi (1958), West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968) and Chicago (2002) are the 8 Best Picture Oscar® winners.

 

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.  Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.  Emmy® is a registered trademark.

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

85 thoughts on “Top 100 Musicals

  1. Not seeing Monte Carlo or The Smiling Lieutenant. Are concert movies ineligible? Also not seeing any Bollywood movies, The Boy Friend, Hallelujah, I’m a Bum or the Ingmar Bergman The Magic Flute. Most striking of all, I’m not seeing South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.

    1. Hey skimpole. Let’s see…South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut is now on the page. I actually almost put that on originally but decided to not include it at the last minute….it sits in a pretty stellar…40th place. The Smiling Lieutenant has also been added and also has a spot in the Top 50…right #50. I think what makes this page different…is all the stats on one line….so I have been adding movies that I can find box office information. All I can find on Monte Carlo is budget information….so it did not get included. The same with Bollywood movies. Monte Carlo’s critic audience rating is 71%…which is in the 130 range…..maybe one day I will find domestic box office information on those movies.

  2. From now on I’m just going to mention movie I THINK will be in the Top 150 (hopefully Top 100); two titles I didn’t see (apologies if they were there and I missed them):

    “Born to Dance” (1936)–This was tap dancer extraordinaire Eleanor Powell’s MGM debut, and she got a Cole Porter score and an excellent supporting cast (James Stewart, Buddy Ebsen, etc.) Film was a success, and received 2(?) Oscar nominations; Best Song, & Best Dance Direction.

    “Lady Be Good”–another Eleanor Powell movie, with a score by six composers. The Jerome Kern/ Oscar Hammerstein song “The Last Time I Saw Paris” won the Best Song Oscar.

    1. Hey Film Lover 293

      1. Born To Dance is one of the few James Stewart movies that I do not have box office information for….so I did not include it in the page. Based on the sources I use to get a critic audience rating…Born To Dance would be ranked 187th…with a 65.25% approval rating.

      2. Lady Be Good…is in the same situation….though its critic audience rating….is 60.0%…which would be in 223rd place. With the total movies being 282 listed now….the cut off point to crack the top 10 is 74%…..RottenTomatoes says a good movie reaches 60%…..I thinks that says the current 100 are all very good movies.

    1. Hey Guil Fisher…..I added Second Chorus into the page……it is pretty far down…but it is in….number 265….thanks for stopping by and commenting.

    1. The Barkleys of Broadway (1949) is sitting in 209th place. I included the Disney 1991 Beauty and the Beast it was at #7. Thanks for checking out my page.

    1. Hey Dan….thanks for the catch…still ironing out some of the bugs….with the links being in the star column….the link would have taken you to the right page (Randolph Scott) even though Gene Kelly was the name showing. Very impressive catching that amongst all of these movies. This is the 2nd biggest page we have ever done. Thanks for checking it out.

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