To make this list a movie had to be made in 1984. Obviously many movies made in 1983 earned box office dollars in 1984. On the other side many movies made in 1984 made money in 1985 and later. This page will looks at over 170 movies made in 1984. The movies are listed in two massive tables that lets you rank the movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information.
Our UMR Top 50 of 1984
1984 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 1984 Movies by movie titles and movie trailers
- Sort 1984 Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
- Sort 1984 Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort 1984 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 1984 Movies received and how many Oscar® wins each 1984 Movies received.
- Sort 1984 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 1984 for Adjusted USA Box Office:
Quigley’s 1984 Top Stars List
1. Clint Eastwood
2. Bill Murray
3. Harrison Ford
4. Eddie Murpy
5. Sally Field
6. Burt Reynolds
7. Robert Redford
8. Prince…no UMR page
9. Dan Aykroyd
10. Meryl Streep
11. Debra Winger…no UMR page
12. Sylvester Stallone
13. Tom Hanks
14. Arnold Schwarzenegger
15. Shirley MacLaine
16. Steve Martin
17. Tom Cruise
18. Jack Nicholson
19. Richard Gere
20. Dolly Parton….no UMR page
21. Robert DeNiro
22. Chuck Norris
23. Kevin Bacon
24. George Burns….no UMR page
25. Dustin Hoffman
I have seen 19 movies from 1984.
The HIGHEST rated film I have seen is Romancing the Stone at 5.
The highest rated film I have NOT seen is Amadeus at 1.
The LOWEST rated film I have seen is Cannonball Run II at 147.
Top 10 Movies I Have Seen: lowest total yet I think
Romancing the Stone
Splash
The Karate Kid
Top 20 Movies I Have Seen:
Strar Trek III: The Search For Spock,
A Passage to India
Footloose
A Soldier’s Story
The Natural
All of Me
Favourite 1984 Movies:
Star Trek III: The Search For Spock
Romancing the Stone
A Passage to India
A Soldier’s Story
The Natural
The Karate Kid
This is Spinal Tap
Footloose
Other 1984 Movies Seen Not in Top 20:
Sixteen Candles
The Muppets Take Manhatten
Top Secret!
Against All Odds (prefer the original but love the title song)
Swing Shift
The Neverending Story
Protocol
City Heat
Cannonball Run II
For people that might not know – I should have added that Against All Odds is the remake of Out of the Past.
Hey Flora….thanks for sharing that information on Against All Odds….I had to re-read it when I realized that a Widmark movie was not on your favorites list. Thanks again.
Hey Flora. Thanks for the tally, the visit and the comment. By 1984….you were getting close oto double digits. We you already watching movies by then…or did that come later. I think when I was that age…I watch whatever my parents or grandmother told me to watch. This was the first yearly page where I crossed the 100 mark….coming in at #101. I have seen the Top 32….only a Muppet movie derailed me. Of your favorites…..I am right there with you on Star Trek 3…as it is in my Top 10….with The Natural, A Soldier’s Story and The Karate Kid just missing my Top 10. I was actually shocked when I saw that A Passage To India got 11 Oscar nominations….I have no memory of that movie getting so much Oscar love…though it only won twice. Good feedback as always.
I was not already going to films in general. I would see the occasional children’s movie by 1984, but that is about it. As for Against All Odds being a Widmark movie and not a favourite, it just could not compare to the original which is considered by some to be the best film noir ever made. Other people say that would be Double Indemnity. I cannot decide which I prefer of the two.
Hey Flora…thanks for explaining your movie watching habits as a 8 year old. Little Cogerson as a 8 year old…was walking around with a notebook and ranking the movies…..lol. I think Double Indemnity and Out Of the Past are indeed the two best film noir movies.
1984! Watch out Big Brother is watching!
I’ve seen 66 of the 183 films on the chart. Looking at my files I have 61 films from 1984 in my movie collection.
My favorites are –
Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai
Amadeus
Bachelor Party
Beverly Hills Cop
Body Double
Bounty ,The
Cat’s Eye
City Heat
Company of Wolves ,The
Conan the Destroyer
Cotton Club ,The
Dreamscape
Dune
Electric Dreams
Firestarter
Ghostbusters
Gremlins
Greystoke
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Karate Kid ,The
Killing Fields ,The
Last Starfighter ,The
Never Ending Story ,The
Nightmare on Elm St. ,A
1984
Once Upon a Time in America
Passage to India ,A
Philadelphia Experiment ,The
Police Academy
Repo Man
Romancing the Stone
Runaway
Sheena
Splash
Star Trek III
Starman
Streets of Fire
Supergirl
Terminator ,The
This is Spinal Tap
Top Secret
2010
Woman in Red ,The
zz-Japan – Godzilla 1985
zz-Japan Anime – Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Whoa 45 favorites! Must be a record for me so far. I wonder if 1985 will top this?
Oscar Winner ‘Amadeus’ tops the UMR chart but The Terminator beats it on the critics charts, interesting. I haven’t rated Terminator yet on my video charts, or Amadeus, or Ghostbusters. Next year I’ll get round to rating all the 1980s and 1990s movies and Bob can compare my scores with yours. 🙂
Another epic movie year page Bruce. Vote Up!
Hey Steve….thanks for checking out our latest yearly review. I have finally hit triple digits in a tally count for a yearly review. I have seen 101 of these movies….including 15 in theaters. By the time 1984 came around, I was driving, working and hitting the movie theater pretty often. Good point about big brother…that movie got lots of publicity…then did almost nothing in theaters…just way to dark and gloomy for the mainstream. I have seen all of your favorites with exception of Supergirl (never saw the whole movie) and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. I was hoping Amadeus would not be the number one movie….but it was actually pretty far ahead of #2 Ghostbusters….proof once again…my personal preferences do not mean anything in these rankings. Terminator blew me away in theaters….if you would have told me in 1984 that James Cameron would have a career that lasted 30 plus years….yet would only make another 6 movies…I would have told you that you were crazy….lol.
My Top 10 in ABC Order
Bachelor Party…..the reason I became a Tom Hanks fan…one of my first midnight movies
Blame It On Rio….got horrible reviews…but I have always found it funny…Caine is very funny
Blood Simple…..the movie that introduced and others to the world of the Coen brothers
Body Double….DePalma having fun
Ghostbusters…..classic comedy…that is still funny…one of your 45
Gremlins….has not aged well…I actually think Gremlins 2 is a better movie
Making The Grade….great memories of watching this one with my high school buddies
Star Trek III…..just wish Spock had a bigger role….I could have lived with the movie being called….Finding Spock and Hanging Out With Him
Streets of Fire…..what a musical on my list?….sort of….Dafoe is good as the bad guy
The Terminator….one of my all-time favorite movies
Good feedback as always.
HI BRUCE
Thanks for the feedback.
I’ll tell S o B you side with him. However you know my quote from The Big Country “I don’t mind. I’ve been on my own before!”
One thing Laddie did have going for him though apart from a pretty face. According to James Mason, who worked with him on the 1952 Botany Bay, Alan was the most athletic actor Mason had ever seen and could move about like a ballet performer. Laddie was apparently a gym champion at High School and worked as a lifeguard for a while on beaches.
However Ladd sets were apparently almost death traps because they contained so many contraptions that were used to disguise his below average height that they were highly congested and moving around them too much could cause injury.
Great news about your record number of views – congrats to you and W o C. Thanks for sharing your own nostalgic memories. Take care.
Hey Bob….hope S o B realizes that I am often on the other side of a discussion with you….and that my siding with him over you is not really that special…..since it happens so much….lol.
I can imagine the Ladd tricks could be a hazard on set. I think athletic ability comes across on screen…pretty much the same way Tom Cruise’s does these days.
October was a strange month…the first part of the month was very slow…..as was the end of the month….but the middle of the month was very very busy. Thanks for the kind words. It is appreciated.
So…with our 1984 yearly page completed and published…we now have yearly reviews from 1929 to 1984…that is 56 straight years of reviews…..and 64 years when adding in the 2010s pages….not too bad. This all started when I became fascinated by the success of 1946. That was Hollywood’s biggest box office year….easily the peak….and a record that will never be broken. Figure I have no choice but to close the gap from 1985 to 2010…..and work my through the 1920s.
HI BRUCE I have seen 10 of the top 15 highest grossing movies in your 1984 chart. Mypersonal favourites in the entire table are in no particular order The Karate Kid, Romancing the Stone, Amadeus and Tightrope, but I do rank The Natural 1st.
The likes of Neverending Story, Gremlins, Ghostbusters Romancing the Stone and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom hold a “generational” nostalgic appeal as I took my son to see them that year when he was just 8 and I have since watched them a couple of times with my grandson, now 12.
I hadn’t realised Prince had made a film of Purple Rain, which was the title of one of his greatest hits. S o B was a great Prince fan and I used to point to the apparent anomaly in that as Prince was only 5ft 2” and yet S o B mocked for his height, and would have banned from the screen, Laddie who was around 5ft 6”. My son’s retort was that Prince didn’t pretend he could administer thrashings to men twice his size and besides Prince was talented and Ladd was not!
S o B also idolised Axel Rose of Guns n Roses who seems to have been a Johnny Depp type figure. Rose publicly attacked by way of innuendo in a song Warren Beatty as a ”dirty old Man” for “stealing” Axel’s teenage girlfriend. Axel reportedly then proceeded to try and win her back by chasing her on horseback through a crowded mall exposing shoppers to the possibility of loss of lie and limb.
Anyway this 1984 Review provides a most welcome trip down Nostalgia Lane for me with many interesting stats to chew upon along the way – so “Vote Up”
NB In W o C lingo S o B stands for Son of Bob and is not used in its more unflattering context despite my quarrels with S o B about Laddie! Anyway I’ll tell him the good news that Prince’s Purple Rain has an adjusted domestic gross of a whopping $183 million and that you’ve given it a respectable 63% critics rating and a high 90.2 UMR score Take care.
Hey Bob
1. Thanks for the tally count for the Top 15 hits of 1984.
2. I tried to count my “movies seen in 1984″…..but I kept falling asleep….as my number is in the low 100s.
3. Interesting about your movie memories and your children…..I have to go a few more years before that happens….though…1988…is right around the corner for these yearly reviews.
4. SoC1 was born in March 1988…..when he was about 6 weeks old….Colors starring Robert Duvall and Sean Penn and directed by Dennis Hopper opened….having no baby sitter…we attempted to see the movie in a theater….I was paranoid he would wake up and start screaming…..instead…..he was quiet and asleep for the entire movie. I joke with him…that his movie watching career started with a R rated movie when he was not even 60 days old!…sorry went off on a tangent.
5. Good stuff on SoB and Prince. Funny argument about the little men Alan Ladd and Prince. Gotta say….on that one….gotta side with SoB……Prince was just singing and dancing with no camera help….while Ladd was acting (and doing it well) as big tough guy….with lots of tricky camera moves.
6. I think the fact that Quigley put Prince as a Top 10 box office draw…shows how Quigley was more about “fame” than it was about actual stats….when they complied their Top Stars. Purple Rain was a hit….but only the 12th biggest hit of the year….yet Prince got 8th? Just does not hold up.
7. Good stuff on Axel, Beatty and the girl….sounds like a movie.
Good feedback as always.
HI BRUCE I forgot to say that I wholeheartedly agree with your point about the Quigley polls and in the Classic Era one of the most glaring examples of how those polls don’t add up is in my view provided by an examination of Burt Lancaster’s box office performance in the 1950s
Burt was in 21 films in the 10 years between 1950 and 1959 inclusive. Your Burt Lancaster stats table shows that collectively those 21 movies have an adjusted domestic gross of around $3.2 billion which gives an excellent average of just under $155 million. Indeed 16 of the films crashed your $100 million barrier and in every one Burt was the star or the joint top star and was never in a supporting role. “Check it out!” as Bill Murray kept saying in Scrooged.
Yet Burt was listed in Quigley Top 10 only once in the 1950s [4th in 1956] and in fact I think was listed in the Top 10 of that poll only once more in his entire career [10th in 1962].
Conversely in his peak 10 years from 1956-1965 inclusive Elvis made 20 movies that grossed about $2 billion in your Presley chart and averaged around $98 million. That’s not bad of course but only 7 crashed your 100 million barrier and those figures come nowhere near to equaling Lancaster’s, yet Elvis was given 6 Quigley Top 10 entries against as said only 1 for Burt in the 1950-59 ten years that I have mentioned in his case.
The greatest anomaly that I can remember in the modern era was the year Brad Pitt released only one movie***, which flopped with an adjusted domestic gross of around $18 million and $42 worldwide in your chart but he still was listed among Top 10 box office e stars of that year whilst a couple of other major stars with one or two reasonably successful movies over $100 million were excluded. I see Brad as a nice enough fellow but he was fashionable at that time and I think his Quigley Top 10 entry proved the old adage that ”If you get the name of rising early you can lie in bed all day.” Certainly a source that ignores hard box office stats can be using relying on only arbitrary subjective judgements
***I think it was Killing the Softly in 2012.
HI BRUCE
I did some further checking and I was right. 2012 was the year in which Pitt got into Quigley’s Top 10 with nothing but a miserable flop, Killing Them Softly..
Bruce Willis had stuck in my mind as someone who was hard done by in 2012 certainly in comparison with the favourable treatment given to Brad. Sure enough Bruce got no Top 10 entry but was in 4 films, two of which did very well – Expendables 2 and Looper with worldwide grosses of $200 million and $340 million respectively.
In Cold Light of Day did very poorly but the 4th one Moonrise Kingdom at least did better than Pitt’s film and collectively the 4 Willis flicks grossed an adjusted $635 million according to you against a miserable $42 million worldwide for Pitt.
It’s really difficult to think of ANY justification for such inconsistency. Moreover even Tom Cruise was excluded from 2012’s Top 10 and he had two movies that year which grossed 329 million worldwide in adjusted dollars.
I of course would have liked to see Bruce make the list in 2012….2012 gave us his last really good movies….2013 gave his last really good box office numbers…as that was the year he apppeared in three sequels….with Red 2 and GI Joe 2 doing pretty well in overseas box office. I think the year Cruise did not make the list, was when Cruise was considered to “weird”…and they excluded him for that reason, more than his box office record. Like him or hate him….Tom Cruise has been one of the most consistent actors to ever appear in movies….good stuff.
Good stats and thoughts on Quigley. I think you can add George Clooney to the Brad Pitt thought. The year his The American crashed and burned he got a spot in the Top 10. As for Lancaster…those stats….show he should have cracked the Top 10 more. I actually think….that with more information on the internet…..Quigley’s lists got more criticized in the modern era…and eventually they stopped the list…which is sad….I might not have agreed with their list…but I liked looking at it. Good stuff as always.
HI BRUCE
Thanks for your detailed responses to my last 3 1984 posts.I agree with everything you say except I don’t miss Quigley. If your’e right about Cruise then they excluded him for reasons that had nothing to do with box office which makes the exercise subjective instead of objective.
It’s therefore a bit of a misnomer in my view to call it Top 10 Greatest Box Office Stars of the year concerned as journalists and the rest of the media have often referred to those lists. Strikes me like something that Joel might have got involved with “I can’t list Brando this year because he makes too much money!”
Anyway have a good weekend. You’ve earned it even if Marlon didn’t in his case!