1934 Top Box Office Movies

This movie page looks at 1934 Top Box Office Movies.  Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1934 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 36,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1935 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1934.  Obviously many movies made in 1933 earned box office dollars in 1934.  On the other side many movies made in 1934 made money in 1935 and later.  This page will looks at 133 1934 Top Box Office 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 1934 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.

Our UMR Top 50 of 1934

1934 Top Box Office 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 1934 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1934 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort 1934 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort 1934 Top Box Office 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 1934 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1934 Top Box Office 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.

Shirley Temple in 1934’s Bright Eyes

Top earners in 1934 for Adjusted USA Box Office:

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: William Schaefer Warner Brothers Ledgers

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions

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

Adjusted Worldwide Box Office

It Happened One Night (1934) $342,645,052.00
The Merry Widow (1934) $291,821,386.00
The Barretts of Wimpole Street (1934) $267,189,325.00
Treasure Island (1934) $259,320,753.00
Tarzan And His Mate (1934) $255,329,444.00
Forsaking All Others (1934) $250,767,940.00
Wonder Bar (1934) $232,065,847.00
Chained (1934) $226,706,085.00
Viva Villa! (1934) $213,819,844.00
The Gay Divorcee (1934) $202,302,139.00
Here Comes the Navy (1934) $200,477,503.00
The Painted Veil (1934) $189,073,786.00
Flirtation Walk (1934) $174,819,128.00
The Thin Man (1934) $174,471,289.00
Dames (1934) $172,538,384.00
Men in White (1934) $165,924,231.00
Sadie McKee (1934) $148,476,521.00
Manhattan Melodrama (1934) $140,607,948.00
Twenty Million Sweethearts (1934) $138,327,196.00
Evelyn Prentice (1934) $132,967,471.00
The Little Minister (1934) $125,897,118.00
The Cat and the Fiddle (1934) $125,326,957.00
Hi Nellie! (1934) $120,195,255.00
Operator 13 (1934) $115,177,632.00
Fashions of 1934 (1934) $110,045,929.00
British Agent (1934) $105,142,377.00
He Was Her Man (1934) $94,561,308.00
Happiness Ahead (1934) $94,536,889.00
Doctor Monica (1934) $79,141,900.00
Of Human Bondage (1934) $77,203,240.00
The Life of Vergie Winters (1934) $74,580,358.00
Gambling Lady (1934) $74,466,370.00
Mandalay (1934) $71,729,445.00
Spitfire (1934) $68,878,495.00
The Man with Two Faces (1934) $61,808,214.00
What Every Woman Knows (1934) $57,246,719.00
Outcast Lady (1934) $54,395,768.00
Jimmy The Gent (1934) $53,255,374.00
I’ve Got Your Number (1934) $53,141,386.00
The Dragon Murder Case (1934) $48,579,880.00
Born To Be Bad (1934) $47,767,450.00
Dark Hazard (1934) $46,755,255.00
Fog Over Frisco (1934) $44,360,477.00
The Key (1934) $44,018,375.00
A Lost Lady (1934) $43,334,144.00
Upperworld (1934) $41,509,564.00
Murder in the Clouds (1934) $40,027,067.00
A Wicked Woman (1934) $37,974,383.00
Housewife (1934) $37,062,093.00
Registered Nurse (1934) $36,834,034.00
Gridiron Flash (1934) $22,693,437.00
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43 thoughts on “1934 Top Box Office Movies”

  1. Hey Bruce,
    Where didi you find the worldwide grosses of It Happened One Night (my favorite Capra’s movie) ? I am impressed.

    Reply

    1. Hey Laurent….got this from a Frank Capra book…..which is not one of my favorite sources….but there is a huge section in that book about the financial history of that movie. Back then the studio included It Happened One Night in a 5 picture deal to theaters….and divided the take between the movies. They attached four horrible movies with It Happened One Night…..so it would lower the box office for that classic. Capra’s contract had some serious bonuses attached to the success of the movie…and the studio was hell bent on making sure he did not get it. Anyway….they listed the worldwide grosses there. Sorry for the long answer…but you asked…lol.

      Reply

      1. Thank you for your very interesting answer. I knew that It Happened One Night had been systematically exploited with other films, but I didn’t know how much, nor did I ever find any satisfactory box-office figures.
        Anyway, I would be very interested to read this book. Can you give me the title please ?

        Reply

        1. Hey Laurent…..the wisdom of WoC strikes again…..she always said I needed to document the source in the database……but I have never done that…….so I am afraid I have forgotten which Capra book that information was in….and he has many books on his movies…..so the search would be difficult. Sorry I was not more help.

          Reply

  2. 1 As in my opinion you are a great authority on the movies of the 1950s and 1960s in particular it does not surprise me that I find little to quarrel with in your comments. However you do me a slight injustice in saying that I have given Mr Mumbles and extra $200 million. There is only ONE GUY on this site who can give Mr M anything extra and THAT GUY unfortunately has a habit of taking grosses away from The Great Mumbler!

    2 If you look at both the domestic and worldwide charts [ie the 2nd table] in Bruce’s excellent 1957 annual review you will find that in adjusted dollars Sayonara grossed around 400 million in US and 600 million worldwide. As I’ve said Bruce got straight from the horse’s mouth – ie the Warner Bros ledgers – the actual figures on which to base his adjustments for inflation so the Sayonara figures are among the most reliable and that’s why I quoted them.

    3 I don’t think there is any “right” or “wrong” method for inflationary adjustments as which method you use will depend on what you are trying to find out. If you want to compare the popularity of films and stars over the decade Bruce’s method in my opinion is excellent. However if you are curious about what a 1940 film’s actual gross would buy you in today’s markets then I think you must use CPI.

    4 Let us not forget either that in the end producers etc are primarily interested in the money that goes into their bank accounts and not in how many people saw a film though there is obviously a correlation between the two factors. For example if movie A is seen by 70 million people at normal prices and grosses say $200 million dollars and movie B is seen by only 60 million but at special prices and grosses $250 million the money men will see the latter as more successful all other things being equal I distinctly remember Chuck Heston’s 10 Commandments in i956 and his Ben Hur in 1959 charging special prices because I could barely afford to pay their admission prices back then

    5 Of course even the latter examples are a simplification because in the end what counts for financial backers of movies is profitability and whilst grosses in the classic era may be relatively weak in terms of what they could buy today, movies generally cost a lot less to make back then.

    6 Indeed Chuck Heston himself said in an interview that the average movie in the classic era would be too dear to produce for the cinema today and that in fact the kind of routine –ie a normal budgeted non-epic- movie that he made in the 1950s was in fact being made for TV instead in the modern era.

    7 Anyway lovely again trading ideas with you. To paraphrase the great Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon “I’m a man who likes talking to a man who likes to talk about the film world of bygone days and by gad Sir what you talk about always interests me.”

    Reply

    1. 1 I meant to say to you that whilst I do not know how Variety presents its figures today back when I used to buy it the magazine did not adjust for inflation and only quoted rentals.

      2 The magazine explained at one point that as the “Bible” for the film industry it confined itself to just ACTUAL money and RENTALS as that was what producers/financial backers of movies were primarily interested in.at the time of a film’s release and were not concerned with later “hypothetical” inflationary calculations or the overall gross once rental ratios had been agreed..

      Reply

      1. Hi Bob,
        Thanks for your further thoughts and my apologies for questioning your Sayonara numbers as I didn’t realize you were talking about it’s worldwide gross. I was almost proud believing to have caught what I thought was one of your very rare errors but instead I’m the one with egg on my face.
        I agree with your points, and as I said the figures one finds most relevant depend on what one is looking for. I can certainly see that from a producer’s point of view, actual box office rental figures were the important ones and this apparently shaped the information reported by Variety. Those of us who are not film producers can thank Cogerson and wife for providing us with the wider picture 🙂

        Reply

        1. HI PHIL

          1 I agree with you about the debt that we owe The Work Horse and W o C. As said I for example have access to Bruce’s comprehensive stats by the Ticket Price method and can then convert them into CPI adjustments so I have the best of both worlds.

          2 I am sure that many other stats buffs who follow Cogerson use his stats as not just a source for learning Ticket price adjusted figures but also as a basis for other different kinds experiments with grosses.

          3 Certainly until WH came along statistical information in the public domain about classic era films was pretty useless and in fact only confused one. For example a columnist would say that film X has grosses $200 million but would not clarify whether that figure related to domestic gross, domestic rentals, worldwide gross or worldwide rentals..

          4 Bruce on the other hand supplies a highly comprehensive array of stats in the simplest and clearest manner. Obviously we are lucky that we also have W o C’s computer.wizardry at hand and for the classic era movies buff the ideal is a computer + Work Horse + W o C – Joel Hirschhorn!

          Reply

          1. Hey Bob and PhilHoF17
            1. Great conversations here.
            2. Ultimately our goal here at UMR is create a way to compare a movie made years ago with a movie released today.
            3. Our UMR Formula tries to “balance out” the field….by using the same criteria for all movies,
            4, Yes there are some issues…that so far we have not been able to fix….for example….the ceiling is $200 million for all the points in the box office category…that does penalize a movie that far exceeds that total…Gone With The Wind and Star Wars get nothing for being 8 and 7 times that $200 million ceiling. It really shows up in our Marvel vs DC page…which is filled with so many box office hits.
            5. By using “butts in seats” we can calculate the estimated adjusted gross…..on the economic side of things we do not explore…the CPI that Bob uses and the population indexes other use….make sense….but with the amount of movies we are dealing with….our formula of (Rentals * (rental to gross multiplier) divided by average ticket price at time of release * current ticket price)) is the one best suited for our website.
            6. I am not standing on a soap box saying it is the way it has to be done…just the way we like to do it.
            7. Sadly those grosses from yesterday will never come to surface…even with the ledgers….but getting an educated guess is what it is all about whether use our way, CPI, population indexes or other ways.
            8. I find it amazing that over the years…the Variety number that I treated as gospel has so many question marks regarding it…..as studio executives either wanted to hide the success of a movie (see..It Happened One Night) or make movies that struggled seem to be bigger hits (see Pride and the Passion).
            Thanks for sharing all of these thoughts…they are greatly appreciated.

    1. Hey Bobby….for some reason you way we use to include the worldwide grosses in not working anymore….so I have not included those numbers….but they are coming. Thanks for the kind words.

      Reply

  4. 1 We are well into the very early years of the talkies with this 1934 Review and have reached the juncture where I personally have seen very few of the films listed and am familiar with many only because of the reputation they have acquired as classics or I have seen them mentioned before on other pages of your site.

    2 For example of the Top 10 best reviewed films on this page I have only ever watched just 4 – It Happened One Night, The Thin Woman, The Gay Divorcee, and Tarzan and His Mate. However I still find great value in even these early 1930s reviews as they give us a comprehensive insight of the cinema in those times and illustrate which films were popular and those less so. Keep up the good work on reaching your target of reviews from 1930 until 1969.

    3 Thanks for your good wishes for my health. All is a lot better now and I hope W o C too is back to normal or nearly there.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob Roy…..I am right there with in regards to knowing the movies but having not seen many of the movies. We plan on going to 1929.or 1930….and then stopping with regards to these yearly reviews. I have seen 5 of the Top 10 reviewed movies. Which is the four you have seen and 20th Century.

      Thanks for the kind words on these yearly reviews….glad you are doing better…..meanwhile WoC is doing much better….she got her GSEC certification on Friday…..traveled to Vegas where she was a featured speaker at a SAP Conference….and by all accounts….gave a wonderful talk that was standing room only. On the negative….the Cogersons she left behind are now struggling with illness. “Life…..one damn thing after another”….lol.

      Reply

      1. HI BRUCE

        1 Glad to hear of W o C’s recovery and other successes.

        2 Just your use of the words “standing room only” brings the nostalgic memories flooding back. In the 1950s [and possibly beyond] when all seats in a movie house were full a sign would go up in the foyer saying those same words – ie those who got into the auditorium would have to stand round the sides or along the back of the auditorium to watch the movie for its duration as all seats were full. Many people persevered with such discomfort back in those days.and still paid the same price as those sitting comfortably. I remember standing for m ost of Golden Holden’s Escape from Fort Bravo in 1953.

        Reply

        1. Hey Bob…..interesting about what “standing room only” meant back in Ireland back in the 1950s. Even more impressive is you remembering standing up for Holden’s Escape From Fort Bravo….what a memory you have….granted that was only 61 years ago.

          Reply

  5. Hello Bruce, it’s Max, i hope that i do not bother you; I have several suggestions regarding the yearly reviews :

    Why not list admissions rather than grosses ?

    It would be easier to compare effectively the true success of movies:

    1) this would solve the problem of movies that have had multiple releases; it would suffice to add up all the admissions without having to take into account inflation. Exit Walt Disney movies a.m.o reissues which creates havoc in your database.

    2) this would avoid recalculating the adjusted for inflations for every movie each year.

    3) this could make it easy to compare all films of all periods together without any problem.

    4) It would allow to add up the available admissions figures of countries like France, Italy, UK and Germany (which do not count revenues but admissions contrary to usa)

    In a very simple way, for films with domestic and overseas rentals figures available ; after converting the rental into grosses: add up the total and divide by the average price of a ticket at the time in usa ; then you’ll have an estimation of admissions worldwide, it will not be perfect but it will be good !

    For films that only have US gross, you just convert them into US admissions and then you add admissions available for other countries (there are European websites with ALL official admission figures available, you just write the name in English in the search bar and the movie appears with the available admissions, it’s very clear and easy) and this considerably changes the final rankings !

    Some examples: The Bible (1966) officially has only the American income in dollars but the film made 11 million admissions in Italy and more than 3 in France; Guns of Navarone has made 10 million admissions in France and 10 million in England ! The bells of Saint Mary officially made an estimated 15 millions admissions in Uk! …Limelight made nearly 7 millions admissions in France ; Papillon (1973) made more than 10 million admissions in Germany ! And all those certified figures aren’t accounted in overseas grosses and there are so many more! All in all this makes a totally different ranking!

    However, I do not suggest adding “local” French or European films; I just suggest adding as much information as you can to movies released in the US and big international co-productions.

    By the way, what i suggest concern only the yearly reviews, not all your fabulous work about the movie stars 😉

    I know it’s a hard work and you are probably the only one that can do that because you’ve got the biggest database i’ve ever seen! So please, make my dream come true (and i’m not the only one) ! Take all the time you need lol but If only you could make a definitive ranking of all the movies with their worldwide income or admissions available, it will be such an event !

    So, if you have some time, tell me what you think about it ?

    Have a nice day, thanks !

    Reply

    1. Hey Max
      1. Not a bother at all.
      2. Thanks for a great comment.
      3. Ah….the great debate of adjusted grosses or tickets sold…..for years Wo C (Wife of Cogerson) has wanted to use ticket prices.
      4. To me…tickets sold is an interesting stat….but it does not really show how a movie compares to today’s movies….for example…20th Century sold about 11.23 million ticket….somebody looking at just that number would really have know idea what that means today…..but by using the adjusted gross one can look at current movies and see how successful or not successfully a movie was…..so when we use the $102 million adjusted gross we see that it is about what the remake Murder on the Orient Express or Daddy’s Home 2 made.
      5. On the tech side of things….currently I can not included the ticket sold number on the table…..which is why our All-Time Ticket Seller page is so messed up.
      6. As for adding in more worldwide numbers ….we are all for it. Just need some better sources….currently we only have about 20% worldwide grosses when looking at movies made before 1980…..we want that number to be much higher.
      7. Thanks for the kind words about pages and our database……comments like that make all of hours spent working on it all the more worthwhile.

      Reply

      1. Hello Bruce, after your explanation, things are clearer …

        I still have another questions :

        in a previous comment, you said:
        “We plan on going to 1929.or 1930….and then stopping with regards to these yearly reviews.”

        Does that mean that you will completely stop doing the yearly reviews?

        If it’s not the case :

        1) I also wanted to know if you were going to do the years 1930-1931-1932-1933 as well as the 60s and 70s in the annual reviews (if i understood correctly, it is no longer necessary from the 80s since the gross are available …)

        2) will you also make the worldwide gross available for the movies of each year (30’s to 70’s) ?…..

        Can’t wait !…It will be wonderful !!!…

        Reply

        1. Hey Max
          1. Thanks for the super kind words.
          2. Ultimately we want a yearly page from 1929 to current year…..currently we have 1934 to 1961, 1976 and 2011 – 2017…..so yes we will be filling in those gaps as we continue producing new material.
          3. It will be awhile before we hit the 1980s…..because generally the box office information is out there…and we want to have 1929 to 1980 covered first.
          4. Yes worldwide grosses will be provided….waiting on WoC to come home to figure out what is wrong with our classic worldwide gross data….it is not cooperating for me currently.
          5. Lots of work to do…but it will be fun to do in the upcoming months.

          Reply

      2. Hi Bruce,
        I’m with Max here in hoping you will not stop the yearly reviews with 1929. I assume you mean you will not go further back than 1929, but still intend to finish off the 1960s..and maybe the 70s eventually?
        I have been reading with interest some of your recent conversations about the best way to represent the relative success of films – ticket price vs gross; butts in seats (your words) vs adjusting population increase, how to account for re-issues etc…I think there is not just one factor which one needs to look at and ultimately it depends what one wants to know. For me, the your adjusted gross numbers combined with your annual rankings provide me with a good indication of what I am looking for, which is the popular success of a film in the context of the time that it was made. With the annual ranking, I can tell for instance that a movie grossing an adjusted $80 million in the late 60s or early 70s was a hit, but a movie grossing the same amount in the 1950s would be considered average at best in terms of its popular success. Yes, things can get a little bit confusing with re-releases, but these are exceptions which could maybe benefit form an explanatory note when needed.
        Glad to see so many people are finding your work so useful and interesting!

        Reply

        1. 1 I am to use your wording one of those people who find Bruce’s work useful and interesting especially as I use his stats for many private exercises and I found your own 15 Feb post very thoughtful

          2 Bruce like Box Office Mojo uses the Ticket price inflation method and I have seen a number of other methods for adjusting movie grosses for inflation. For example Wikipedia and other sites/organisations use the CPI method [ie the Consumer Price Index of the US Bureau of Labour Statistics] which measures the strength of purchasing power of grosses in contemporary markets regardless of how many tickets a movie sold.

          3 Older stars and movies fare worse than modern ones under that method as ticket prices rose much faster than general inflation up to about the mid-1960s. As an example I will use Mr Mumbles’ 1957 Sayonara as Bruce got its worldwide stats direct from the Warner Bros ledgers [and in fact was generous enough to share that information with me at my request before he had the opportunity to formally include it in any of his charts on this site].

          4 Using the price Ticket Inflation method Bruce quotes an adjusted worldwide gross of $602 million for Sayonara which converts to an ACTUAL worldwide gross of approx $37 million back in 1957. However under the CPI method the purchasing power of $37 million earned in 1957 in today’s money is $332 million compared with Bruce’s $602 million which would result from ticket sales today if that movie were released under 2018 ticket prices and watched by the same number of people who saw it back in 1957 Some statisticians don’t like the ticket price inflation method because of course it will never now happen that Sayonara will be so released and watched. The CPI method on the other hand it is argued is a positive guide to the value of the goods and services that could be purchased today by someone with wealth equivalent to $37 million back in 1957.

          5 Another method is a convoluted one which I call the “formula method” and takes into account actual grosses, ticket price inflation, population increases, and a variety of other factors such as number of cinemas in existence at any given time and the amount of competition from other mediums and activities when a given movie was released.

          6 There is a set formula for applying that method and under it the films that do best are those released in the 1970s. For example Bruce and Mojo are both agreed that by the ticket price method Airport (1970) and The Godfather (1972) have adjusted domestic grosses of $605 million and $725 million respectively. However under the “formula” method the adjusted domestic grosses of both these flicks reach nearer $1 billion with Burt Lancaster’s Airport in fact slightly leap-frogging Godpop. [worldwide figures n/a]

          7 However the Ticket Price inflation method employed by Bruce and Box Office Mojo is the best one that I know of for comparing the ACTUAL POPULARITY of films and stars over the years in financial terms as in the end that method reflects “bums on seats”
          I do though enjoy using the CPI method to test the purchasing power today of actual grosses from yesteryear, but I couldn’t do that without the figures that Bruce supplies. In other words my CPI exercises are really Bruce’s figures interpreted in a different way and HE is still the “founder of the feast” – ie THE MAN As Rosemary Clooney said about herself, Danny and Vera when they were making White Christmas “We all knew it was really Bing’s show”

          Reply

          1. Bob,
            Thanks for sharing these very interesting thoughts and pieces of information on how one can think of the relative success of a film using different methods of accounting for inflation. I have to admit that at first, I did not quite understand why some would find CPI adjustment to be a more meaningful indicator, given that ticket prices have increased at a much faster rate than general inflation.
            However, upon reflection, I can see that it does have it merits, since it accounts for the fact that with time, people have had more options to spent their “entertainment” dollars on, so that one can argue that a $200 million gross today compares favorably with say a $300 million gross in the 1940s.
            I think that I have been accounting for this by using Bruce’s annual ranking side-by-side with the ticket price adjusted grosses. I do think that if one just looks at ticket price adjusted grosses, one can get an over-inflated view of the popularity of older films and potentially their stars, while conversely underestimate the success of more recent films. The fact that proportionally, many more people went to the movies in Hollywood’s golden age, means that movie stars were generally much more recognizable to people than they are today, but it also means that these stars had a lot more competition, so a star with say a dozen films grossing over $100 million would likely not be as important as one with the same numbers today. Not sure if I’m expressing what I mean clearly, but I think you will probably understand me.

            Just to end on a light note: while I respect that fact that you are a devoted fan and virulent defender on this site of the so-called Mr. Mumbles, that is no reason to sneak in an extra $200 million in the adjusted gross of Sayonara, which according to Bruce’s method grossed $402.8 million, not quite the $602 million you would like us to believe 🙂

        2. Hey PhilHoF17…..not going to stop until there is a completed bridge from 1929 to 1980. I think somebody can make great arguments with regards to trying to show how successful a movie was at the box office. The way we do it here is the way I personally like to see it…..but it makes it real easy to compare movies from different decades. The thing about our database..is the fact that the entire program is based on adjusted gross……so even when he get quality suggestions….there is not much we can do…..with regards to making changes….the dye has been cast….we would have to re-start the entire process…which is now 7 plus years old….almost 40,000 movies….and thousands of UMR pages. Thanks for the quality feedback.

          Reply

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