Finding box office information for movies made before 1980 is not an easy task. For somebody looking for box office information on 1970 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 1970 movies in our database.
To make this list a movie had to be made in 1970. This page will looks at 127 1970 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. This only represents about 33% of the movies made in 1970….but should cover the top box office movies.
Our UMR Top 50 of 1970
1970 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 1970 Movies by movie titles and movie trailers
- Sort 1970 Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
- Sort 1970 Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort 1970 Movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each 1970 Movies received and how many Oscar® wins each 1970 Movies received.
- Sort 1970 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.
Top earners in 1970 for Adjusted USA Box Office:
My Main Sources
Source 1: Variety – January 6th, 1971, January 5th, 1972
Source 2: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon
Source 3: Wikipedia
Source 4: IMDb.com
Source 5: BoxOfficeMojo.com
Hi Mr. Cogerson,
Please forget # 3 and 4 on previous request.
They are already on the 1970 database.
Thx
Mike
Hi Mr. Cogerson,
Please review movies missing from the year 1970 that might need to be added.
1.Angels Die Hard $700,000 USD source: wikipedia Christopher T Koetting, Mind Warp!: The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Hemlock Books. 2009 p 16
2.Student Nurses over $1 million source: wikipedia Christopher T Koetting, Mind Warp!: The Fantastic True Story of Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Hemlock Books. 2009 p 16
3.Wuthering Heights $4.5 million (est.) source: wikipedia American International Pictures’ Profit Steady: Company Says Results for Third Fiscal Quarter Were About the Same as for Year-Ago Period Wall Street Journal (1923 – Current file) [New York, N.Y] 12 Oct 1971: 37.
4.Diary of a Mad Housewife $6.1 million (rentals) source: wikipedia “All-time Film Rental Champs”, Variety, 7 January 1976, pg 46.
also: $2,782,256 IMDB
5.Ann and Eve $18,000,000 source: wikipedia Top Grossing Films of 1970″
also:$18,000,000 IMDB
6.Chariots of the Gods $25.9 million source: wikipedia “Erinnerungen an die Zukunft (1970)”. www.worldwideboxoffice.com.
also:$25,948,300 IMDB
Please review and advise
Thx
Mike
It’s interesting to compare figures between sites. UMR shows the domestic box office for RYAN’S DAUGHTER as $44.4 million. The Numbers shows domestic at $30,846,306. That’s a big difference. Box Office Mojo doesn’t have a dog in the fight, since they have no domestic gross figure for the film at all, just a $8,358, 000 international number.
Hey Robert. Thanks for checking out our 1970 page. I think the way older box office is, unless someone is directly taking from another website they’re all gonna be all over the place. Anybody claiming to know the exact box office, should be probably not taken too seriously. I think we are left with people making the best guesses. I’d like to think we here at this website have done lots of research in calculating our box office. When we first started doing this, the conventional wisdom was to double the rentals to get the gross. I suspect the numbers do it that way. Through lots of research we have determined the rental to gross percentage changes every single year, heck it changes sometimes with different movies and how they were released. Simply having a double the rentals approach is not the best way, in our opinion. As for Ryan’s Daughter it has a rental of about 15 million. If you double that you get roughly what the numbers has. However based on our percentage of rental the gross percentage it would actually be more that year. Thus we are a good portion higher than them. Sadly we will not know who is right. However if better information comes out will always be willing to change our number. I love the numbers, it is replace box office mojo. Mojo was my favorite source but still have not forgiven them for starting to charge for everything. I suspect I’m not the only one that no longer goes to that website. Sorry if I ranted too long, hope that explains things from our view. Once again thanks for stopping by.
This meticulous page is a valuable document that provides a great insight of the commercial cinema of the year that started off the wonderful 1970s. More like it please and I see that in fact we already have 1971 and 1976.
1970’s massive hit Love Story proved to be the harbinger of a constant stream pf big films throughout that decade which were phenomenal grossers to one degree or another and many of which are today regarded as classics and/or cult movies – Airport, Godfather, The Sting, The Exorcist, Godpop 2 Jaws, Star Wars, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, Smokey and the Bandit Superman [1978] Grease, Star Trek the Motion Picture, Apocalypse Now and Kramer v Kramer. In the COGERSON charts these 15 films have a staggering overall adjusted domestic gross of $10.4 billion [average some $695 million] and of course will most probably have well-exceeded an adjusted global average of over 1 billion worldwide.
Wikipedia defines a blockbuster movie as one that makes large sums of money and particularly a film that has a big budget and important stars, and the 1970s also saw an escalation in production costs as the decade wore on. For example Love Story and The Godfather [1972] cost just $15 million and $36 million respectively whereas Godpop 2 in 1974 had a $68 million budget with tail end of the decade budgets of $220, 165 million and 115 million for respectively the 1978 Superman, Star Trek the Motion Picture and Apocalypse Now. [All those figures are inflation adjusted ones at 2018 prices. The ACTUAL budget figures at time of release are provided by Wiki.]
Fun year.4 all time favorites(top 135) : patton, mash, kelleys heroes( a military trend?) and 2 mules for sister sara a hidden gem that Shirley mclaine nails. no others in my top 500. I need to revisit these, most were one and done and I am sure I was going through a hyper critical phase as a rebellious 13 year old.
I will use your favorites lists to revisit 1970 movies, thanks.
dan, amazing list from a remarkable man.
I hate it when people say the _____ was better; however, I was awed by reading catch 22(took 8 years to write) , i waited over 13 years for joseph hellers next novel , Something Happened, it reached number 1 on new York times best seller list, I thought it was awful. LOL
Hey bob cox. I see two Clint movies made your favorites list. I like both as well….but I watch Kelly’s Heroes almost once a year. I actually find MASH slow moving these days…..maybe all those years of watching MASH the tv show messed that movie for me. Interesting about your hyper critical phase. Catch-22 for you….Slaughter House Five for me….as that is the novel that made the most impact on me when I read it for the first time when I was around 13. Good feedback.