1942 Top Grossing Movies

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in the biggest box office hit of 1942...Mrs. Miniver
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in the biggest box office hit of 1942…Mrs. Miniver

This movie page looks at 145 1942 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 1942 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 23,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1942 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1942.  Obviously many movies (How Green Was My Valley and Ball of Fire) made in 1941 earned box office dollars in 1942.  On the other side many movies made in 1942 made money in 1943 and later.  This page will looks at 168 1942 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.

And now for the part of the movie page that the wife calls the “drivel” part of our movie pages.  When we decided to do a page on 1942 box office grosses….the thought was this was going to be an easy and fast page to write…well 3 days later and we are finally finishing off the page.  Guess the fact that we have collected so many sources of box office information is a good but very time consuming thing. Talk about confusing….Casablanca is listed by IMDb as a 1942 movie.  Casablanca was not eligible for the Oscars® for movies made in 1942…but did qualify for the Oscars® for movies made in 1943…..so that is why we have two Best Picture Oscar® winners on one page.

Gary Cooper in 1942's The Pride of the Yankees
Gary Cooper in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees

Our UMR Top 50 of 1942

1942 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 1942 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1942 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 1942 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1942 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.
James Cagney in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy
James Cagney in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy

 

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

How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1942….BoxOfficeMojo was not around to keep track of box office earnings. Back then earnings seem to be a secret and a secret that needed to be safely locked up.  When studios did report box office stats they used “box office rentals”.  Box office rentals were the amount of money the studio got back from the theaters.  It is NOT the box office gross.  We created a computer program that looked at box office rentals and known box office grosses in my database.  My program found over 2,000 movies that matched that criteria and came up with an average of 2.2.  Meaning that box office gross was 2.2 times greater than box office rentals.  It is not an exact calculation….but it is the multiplier I used to calculate the grosses.  For example:  Lets look at Errol Flynn’s Desperate Journey. Desperate Journey returned to RKO studies $2,029,000 million in box office rentals.  Using my multiplier of 2.2….I calculate that the box office gross was $4,463,000 million in 1942. 

If a big budget movie made $4.43 million today it would be considered a huge box office bomb (can you say The Adventures of Pluto Nash?).  To compare box office results from movies from different eras you have to use tickets sold as the common denominator.  Back in 1942 the average movie admission was .28 cents (Box Office Mojo says it is .23 cents…but I disagree with their number).  So you take the box office gross and divide it by average movie admission….in this case…$4.43 million divided by $.23 you get 15.8 million tickets sold in 1942. Now (have I lost you yet?) you take the average movie admission price today ($8.14) and multiply that by tickets sold.  15.8 * $8.14 = $128.61 million  So if Desperate Journey was released this year it would earn about $125.00 million.  Desperate Journey’s unadjusted box office total of 4.43 million would rank as the 153rd highest grossing film of 2014….right behind The Skelton Twins.  But if we look at Desperate Journey’s adjusted box office total of $125.00 million…it would rank as the 23rd highest grossing movie of 2014….one spot ahead of Lucy.

Not Enough Stats?  How About A 1942 Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Table?

1942 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

Jump to Domestic Box Office

My Yearly Review Pages

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29 thoughts on “1942 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. What happened to the actual domestic grosses for 1942? They are there for 1941 and 1943, but have disappeared this year.

    Reply

    1. Hey Robert….good question…I see a worldwide table…so it seems the wrong table on main table is showing….let me see if I can fix it. Good catch.

      Reply

  3. Hi Mr.Cogerson,

    Here is a list of 1942 movies that may be missing from your 1942 movies.

    1942 One of Our Aircraft Is Missing $478,939 (US rentals Source-Wikipedia
    1942 The Bashful Bachelor $675,000 (USA) Source-Wikipedia
    1942 Born to Sing $543,000 Source-Wikipedia
    1942 This Time for Keeps $327,000 Source-Wikipedia

    Please review and advise

    Thx

    Mike

    Reply

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