1976 Top Grossing Movies

1976’s Rocky was the biggest hit of the year and won the Oscar for Best Picture

This movie page looks at 125 1976 Top Grossing Movies Finding box office information for movies made before 1980 is not an easy task.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1976 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 30,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1976 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1976.  Obviously many movies (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon) made in 1975 earned box office dollars in 1976.  On the other side many movies made in 1976 made money in 1977 and later.  This page will looks at 125 1976 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.

Drivel Part:  So why 1976?  There are a couple of reasons….first it was a request from Flora….who happens to have been born in 1976.  Secondly …..this was the last year that some of my favorites (John Wayne & Alfred Hitchcock) made movies.  And thirdly….our previous yearly UMR pages have been very popular.

1976 Best Picture Oscar nominated movies

Our UMR Top 50 of 1976

1976 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 1976 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1976 Top Grossing Movies by actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1976 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1976 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 each1976 Top Grossing Movies received
  • Sort by how many Oscar® wins each 1976 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1976 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.

Kris Kristofferson & Barbra Streisand in the 2nd biggest hit of 1976…A Star Is Born

My Main Sources

Source 1: Variety – January 5th, 1977 Pages 14 and 44.

Source 2: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon

Source 3:  Wikipedia

Source 4:  IMDb.com

Source 5:  BoxOfficeMojo.com


How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1976….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.  Every year the rental to box office gross percentage changed…in 1976 this meant you had to triple the rentals to get the gross….so the multiplier used in this page was 3.0.

My Yearly Review Pages

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44 thoughts on “1976 Top Grossing Movies

      1. Bruce, I don’t really expect you’ll have much Box Office info on stuff I comment on. However, we have lots of super helpful contributors who might be able to direct you in the right direction by your mentioning you are missing the key ingredient – box office data. Consider them “placeholders” for movies that may well end up on your lists if you can track the box info data down. By leaving the comments, folks can be aware of decent movies internationally that have yet to be fit into the global puzzle. They are still “missing pieces”. In some cases I may in fact err on the fact that it may be hard to distinguish even with IMDB help whether a movie made it to the theater abroad or whether it was just realized on their home tv market as a made for tv movie. Usually IMDB gives us TV clues and I try to avoid commenting on those here. Here is a source that you might find helpful. That said you’ll likely need to grab the original French title from IMDB to find the data: http://www.boxofficestory.com/asterix-box-office-de-la-franchise-a113439166

        1. For the record, I don’t speak or read French. Yes hard to believe considering how many comments I make about French films. If you use google translate it might help with some of these French box office data links like the one I posted. Best of luck with the French data sources!

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