1948 Top Grossing Movies

This movie page looks at 1948 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 1948 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 33,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1948 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1948.  Obviously many movies made in 1947 earned box office dollars in 1948.  On the other side many movies made in 1948 made money in 1949 and later.  This page will looks at 139 1948 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 1948 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.

John Wayne & Montgomery Clift in 1948’s Red River

Our UMR Top 50 of 1948

1948 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 1948 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1948 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1948 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1948 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 1948 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1948 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.

Lauren Bacall & Humphrey Bogart in 1948’s Key Largo

1948 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: Variety Magazines –

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

 

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31 thoughts on “1948 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. Could anyone please provide me with documentation for the box office numbers for “The Search” (e.g., a page from Variety with box office stats for the film)? I’m publishing an article on the film and need to be able to say where exactly the $1.8 million number came from. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks!

    Reply

    1. Hey Anna…..The Search did not crack the million dollar rental mark. So it did not make Variety’s Top Grossing Movies. Despite being a MGM movie, The Search is not (at least where I looked) in the MGM ledger. That left us to do research in some Clift books and the Harrison Reports (1948). In the Harrison Report of October 30th, 1948 they list The Search as being “Fair” at the box office. So using our 36,000 movie database…we compared all the Fair movies of 1948 and the information in the Clift books to come up with a rental number of just a tad over 700,000. Rentals are not the gross….but the amount the studio got back. We estimate that 700,000 in rentals would be the $1.9 million in gross. All of the numbers are estimated….the actuals will never be known…as studios made sure to keep that a secret. Anybody who claims to have the actual grosses would fail to understand the reality of the bookkeeping system back then. Hope that helps.

      Reply

      1. Yes, thank you, that’s very helpful. Strangely, Wikipedia’s “1948 in film” article lists “The Search” as one of the top-grossing films, with more than a $3.1 million gross, but there are no notes, so I have no idea where the number is coming from.

        Reply

        1. Hey Anna. Interesting about Wiki. The Search was much more popular in Europe than in the United States. So maybe the 3.1 million is worldwide gross. I can easily see that….but I feel pretty good about our domestic estimate. In the MGM book I own….it mentions The Search being a hit overseas.

          In one of the Zinnermann books I read it talks about how the marketing here in the states, ruined any chance of it being successful. The movie’s poster had no faces on it (Clift was not a star yet), the marketing concentrated on making it a thriller (publicity photos showed a man chasing a woman in dark alleys)….and ignored the child caught in the war aspect…..which made the movie seem “more of an orphan than a MGM release”.

          Reply

  2. I’m trying to figure out how you got the box office figures for “The Red Shoes”…. If you use the same formula you have I am getting a lower rental figure than anywhere else I find. Being a member of Newspaper Archive, I have found a bunch of entries here and there, and appears to only played 3 to 4 days at a time in any particular city. In early 1949 the tickets were going from $1.20 to $1,80 a piece, by mid 1950 the ad’s say “Now at Popular Price” and run from 40c matinee to 65c evening in most venues, with some at 35c and 60c. March 24, 1949 is the first showing I can find outside of the single New York run from 1948 …. I hope to find earlier dates, but that seems to be the first. Odd thing is, I can only find one or two cities a month that played the Red Shoes over the next 2 years or more, and those 2 to 4 day play dates would had to have been packed to bring in the rental income that the movie supposedly had done. Your thoughts? and what rental income do you have and where did you get that figure from? Thanks.

    Reply

    1. Hey Chris.
      1. First of all….thanks for checking out this page.
      2. Ah….questions about The Red Shoes’ box office grosses. Ok….here we go. The Red Shoes is one of those rare movies that got released originally did moderately well at the box office…and then a few years later…got re-released and was a box office smash.
      3. In 1948 The Red Shoes was the 56th biggest hit of the year…then in 1951 (I think…going by memory) it earned more than in rentals
      4. Variety reports that The Red Shoes had a rental number of 2.2 million in 1948…..and a 5.0 million total. So my calculation shows a $125.00 million adjusted gross for 1948….and an adjusted gross of $124.00 for the second release….for a grand total of $249.00 million.
      5. If I would have used it’s career total in 1948….the gross would have been about $290 million….or over inflated by about $40 million.
      6. One of the rules I had to go with when doing these yearly pages…is to put all the movies with the same production year together…..that of course creates a false impression. This page is the perfect example….in 1948 The Red Shoes was not even in the Top 50…but because of a re-release it sits on top of the list.
      7. Years ago the box office gurus tried to do the top hits by going summer to summer…..but the same thing happens no matter what way you want to do it…..like lots of things…there is no right or wrong way…..just the way you prefer it to be.
      8. Gone With The Wind was (and is in my mind) the biggest box office hit of all-time…..it is listed as the top box office movie of 1939…..when the reality is……it made almost nothing in 1939. It had it’s big Atlanta premiere in late December of 1939…..hit some big cities for a week of release…and then 1940 was here.
      Hope that answers the question….FYI….I really really dislike movies that got re-released…it causes havoc in my database….lol.

      Reply

  3. BRUCE

    Above On an Island with You is duplicated but with different figures for the actual gross as well as for the adjusted gross.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….On An Island With You has been fixed….and now the Esther Williams, Cyd Charisse and 1948 pages match. Also I got rid of the “extra” On A Island With You…thanks for the headsup….it is greatly appreciated.

      Reply

      1. HI BRUCE

        No, I thank you. As you may have guessed I’m doing another one of my special exercises and am entirely relying on your figures.

        Reply

        1. Hey Bob…..glad our figures are helping with your projects. Good to know all our hours of data entry are being used.

          Reply

  4. Hey Lupino. I agree 1948 was a great year for movies. I have only seen about half of your favorite movies. An Act of Murder sounds interesting….I will have to check that one out.

    Good point about how things changed in the movie world back then. I think seeing movies that represent the beginning and the end of people’s careers is one of the really cool things. Thanks for the feedback.

    Reply

  5. 78 movies watched- and what a great year! Portrait of Jenny, my alltime favorite romantic fantasie, Letter from an unknown Woman, A Foreign Affair, Sorry, wrong Number, Johnny Belinda, one of my top westerns, Red River, one of my fav musicals, Easter Parade, I remember Mama, Three Godfathers, An Act of Murder with a fine performance by F. March and an unusual topic, some great Brits (Anna Karenina, though certainly flawed, but nevertheless fascinating, Oliver Twist and The Red Shoes), the great italian Ladri de biciclette, and the funny Unfaithfully Yours. Plus, some small budget winners like Ruthless, Hollow Triumph and the very good Act of Violence. What I find extremely interesting is the way these charts reflect the changing taste in audience reception so shortly after the end of WWll. Great Stars like Bette Davis, Claudette Colbert, Joan Fontaine and Veronica Lake are loosing Ground, though when partnered with a strong Costar (Crosby in Emperor Waltz, Ladd in Saigon), they still can muster some box office cloud. Davis would soon come back to her old glory, though only for a short time, with her iconic portrayal of Margo Channing in All about Eve, Fontaine would linger on in less important films and then as a “second lead” during the next decade, Colbert would have some medium hits to come but eventually would go down the road of “a picture shot in England” or a Repulic Western, while Veronica Lake would prove herself unable to regain her WWII fame. The hardest fall, though, was taken by the Girl who once saved Universal Pictures from bankruptcy. Deanna Durbin’s 1948 pictures made slightly more money than a little B starring a totally unknown Marilyn Monroe. She would do the wisest thing, quitting movies completely and settling for a reportedly happy private life in Paris. New arrivals include Montgomery Clift and Doris Day, both with so much more to come.

    Reply

    1. Hey Lupino great comment. 78 movies is a pretty stout total and good enough for the silver medal. Part 2 coming.

      Reply

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