1935 Top Box Office Movies

This movie page looks at 1935 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 1936 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 1935.  Obviously many movies made in 1934 earned box office dollars in 1935.  On the other side many movies made in 1935 made money in 1936 and later.  This page will looks at 172 1935 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 1935 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.

Errol Flynn in 1935’s Captain Blood

Our UMR Top 50 of 1935

1935 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 1935 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1935 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort 1935 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort 1935 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 1935 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1935 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.

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire in 1935’s Top Hat

Top earners in 1935 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 1935 Worldwide Grosses in our database.

  1. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) $521,512,669.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  2. Anna Karenina (1935) $237,257,174.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  3. Top Hat (1935) $329,832,752.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  4. Captain Blood (1935) $254,866,048.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  5. David Copperfield (1935) $315,519,052.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  6. Broadway Melody of 1936 (1935) $295,644,648.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  7. A Tale of Two Cities (1935) $236,238,817.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  8. China Seas (1935) $295,232,717.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  9. Naughty Marietta (1935) $211,822,031.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  10. Roberta (1935) $240,449,421.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  11. G-Men (1935) $202,142,248.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  12. The Last Days of Pompeii (1935) $160,642,861.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  13. A Night At The Opera (1935) $186,901,778.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  14. West Point of The Air (1935) $135,619,639.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  15. I Live My Life (1935) $152,198,843.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  16. After Office Hours (1935) $131,912,508.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  17. No More Ladies (1935) $167,130,361.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  18. Devil Dogs in the Air (1935) $173,926,778.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  19. A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) $126,557,717.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  20. The Informer (1935) $97,827,383.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  21. Reckless (1935) $137,885,108.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  22. Go Into Your Dance (1935) $144,269,639.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  23. Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935) $140,562,500.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  24. The Three Musketeers (1935) $92,678,557.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  25. The Irish in Us (1935) $137,679,161.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  26. In Caliente (1935) $95,870,831.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  27. Escapade (1935) $100,401,778.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  28. Frisco Kid (1935) $151,272,030.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  29. Shipmates Forever (1935) $150,551,191.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  30. Whipshaw (1935) $99,372,030.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  31. I Found Stella Parish (1935) $87,529,739.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  32. Bordertown (1935) $127,381,526.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  33. Oil For The Lamps Of China (1935) $97,930,361.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  34. Broadway Gondolier (1935) $115,230,369.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  35. Dr. Socrates (1935) $76,923,231.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  36. Black Fury (1935) $82,586,879.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  37. Private Worlds (1935) $84,349,645.00 in adjusted worldwide gross
  38. Murder in The Fleet (1935) $64,875,000.00
  39. Break of Hearts (1935) $71,568,439.00
  40. Dangerous (1935) $74,554,783.00
  41. Star of Midnight (1935) $93,811,344.00
  42. I Dream Too Much (1935) $65,904,782.00
  43. One New York Night (1935) $52,517,860.00
  44. Page Miss Glory (1935) $102,358,339.00
  45. In Person (1935) $73,627,969.00
  46. Stranded (1935) $58,284,521.00
  47. Sweet Music (1935) $92,060,722.00
  48. Society Doctor (1935) $54,989,279.00
  49. The Murder Man (1935) $56,225,000.00
  50. Alice Adams (1935) $79,291,669.00
  51. Charlie Chan in Shanghai (1935) $52,644,013.00
  52. Shanghai (1935) $52,644,013.00
  53. Annie Oakley (1935) $63,845,217.00
  54. Stars Over Broadway (1935) $59,932,130.00
  55. The Goose and the Gander (1935) $52,105,948.00
  56. Sylvia Scarlett (1935) $51,179,170.00
  57. Living on Velvet (1935) $51,900,000.00
  58. Traveling Saleslady (1935) $54,062,500.00
  59. Little Big Shot (1935) $44,897,609.00
  60. Alibi Ike (1935) $61,579,783.00
  61. Miss Pacific Fleet (1935) $50,046,409.00
  62. Front Page Woman (1935) $52,311,878.00
  63. Dinky (1935) $38,616,091.00
  64. Mad Love (1935) $37,450,392.00
  65. The Woman in Red (1935) $44,897,608.00
  66. The Right to Live (1935) $35,217,861.00
  67. The White Cockatoo (1935) $33,158,330.00
  68. Times Square Lady (1935) $43,661,887.00
  69. The Girl From 10th Avenue (1935) $44,073,800.00
  70. Babyface Harrington (1935) $34,188,121.00
  71. Kind Lady (1935) $26,773,809.00
  72. The Payoff (1935) $32,231,561.00
  73. Man of Iron (1935) $28,112,500.00
  74. A Night at the Ritz (1935) $25,538,113.00
  75. Don’t Bet On Blondes (1935) $34,188,121.00
  76. Enchanted April (1935) $16,991,048.00
  77. His Family Tree (1935) $11,945,252.00
  78. Captain Hurricane (1935) $15,446,452.00
(Visited 1 times)

15 thoughts on “1935 Top Box Office Movies”

  3. It’s interesting to me that the #44 film (out of 178) for 1935 (rated overall 79%) is Page Miss Glory which starred Marion Davies, but you do not mention her anywhere. Maybe you’ve overlooked the fact that Marion Davies is the STAR of the movie. And with an adjusted world wide gross of $102,358,339.00, can’t you revise your website to include an active link to her information and include her? Thank you.

    Reply

    1. Hey Leslie…thanks for checking out our 1935 yearly review. Currently we do not have an UMR page on Ms. Davies. We usually include co-stars that have UMR links in that column. On occasion it does leave out the main star of the movie. So….since you were nice enough to comment…I have deleted Lyle Talbot from the co-star column and added in Marion Davies. One day we will have a page on her. Good feedback.

      Reply

  4. This is the first time I ever saw an actual Box Office Figure on Bride of Frankenstein. Any source I ever read had two comments. One was that it was not enough to stop Universal from going bankrupt in 1936. The other was that by 1943 it had earned 2 million dollars.

    Nice to know it did that well at the Box Office! It was one of the greatest horror/fantasy films ever made and one of the few exceptions where the sequel exceeded the original.

    It’s great that UMR provides the figure that shows what a film actually did at the Box Office rather than the figure presented which is after production and distribution costs are taken out.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bill K. I always say our box office figures are “estimations only”. Depending on the source is how much I believe in the number. In this case….the number comes from a book on Universal Horror Movies. Books are our least favorite source. Sadly Universal does not have any known “ledgers” out there. Bride of Frankenstein did not make any of the Top Grossing Movie lists in 1935 or 1936.

      That being said…..we feel pretty good about this number. If we reverse engineer with the sources we do have for 1935…then the book’s box office gross makes sense. As for your last paragraph. Many of the “ledgers” numbers we have gotten over the years, required us to sign lots of paperwork about their use. You will rarely if ever just see “ledger” numbers on our website……but our calculations on gross using those ledger numbers are not a “copywrite” issue.

      Glad a movie fan found our pages. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

      Reply

  5. 1 HI BRUCE In 1935 [now 83 years ago] most if not all of your regulars would not have been around certainly as active filmgoers and yet to elderly buffs like me the classics of that year are among those that have become so legendary and celebrated that they are seared into the consciousness more that many great modern films. Examples in your chart of the former are Mutiny on the Bounty, Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Captain Blood, Coleman’s A Tale of Two Cities, and for me especially Top Hat and A Night at the Opera.

    2 By tackling 1935 you have now in fact reached down into the very earliest years of the serious talkies and if you meet your most immediate target of 1930-1969 Annual Reviews you will have covered the talkies from their virtual onset right thru the classic era and well into the modern era.

    3 All I can say is “Keep going” in the knowledge that it is easy enough for ME to say that whilst it is in fact some undertaking to track down potential grosses for the infant years of talking pictures.

    4 Indeed I see you envisage problems with the 60s and 70s and I agree with you about the general poor box office grosses information about those years. In fact for some reason Box Office Mojo in certain cases lists movies pre 1982 and then says that grosses are N/A and even then the lists are usually far from complete. See for example the Mumbles Mojo page involving such nonsense.

    5 Incidentally I have been meaning to congratulate you on tracking down actual figures upon which to calculate adjusted grosses for the silent films of Bank of America’s Sweetheart. Pickford’s page still retains her actual grosses though the same have been removed from most if not all of the classic era stars’ individual pages. However thankfully the missing actual figures have of course been re-emerging en masse in the Annual Reviews.

    6 I relate to your actuals continuously in my private exercises though it is of course via your adjusted grosses that you make sense of it all for us.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob
      1. Thanks for the kind words about this page….I have to admit…when I saw the finished page….I was pretty pleased with ourselves…..since it turned out so well.
      2. The added benefit of it being dynamic….as soon as we get the official average ticket price of 2017….we can update the entire page with one button….looking forward to that.
      3. We will “keep going”….2018 has started off strong…as we already have produced 12 new pages.
      4. Mojo is the king after 1982…..they are not too impressive pre-1982.
      5. Glad you like the Pickford numbers….there were some decent sources for those movies….the benefit of being the biggest star in the world for many years.
      Once again…thanks for the compliments….they are greatly appreciated.

      Reply

Leave a 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.