1962 Top Box Office Movies

Finding box office information for movies made before 1980 is not an easy task.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1962 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 1962 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1962.  This page will looks at 108 1962 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 25% of the movies made in 1962….but should cover the top box office movies.

Gregory Peck in 1962’s To Kill A Mockingbird

Our UMR Top 50 of 1962

1962 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 1962 Top Box Office Movies by movie titles and movie trailers
  • Sort 1962 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1962 Top Box Office Movies by stars of the movie
  • Sort 1962 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1962 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 each 1962 Top Box Office Movies received and how many Oscar® wins each 1962 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1962 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.
 
Trevor Howard, Marlon Brando and Richard Harris in 1962’s Mutiny on the Bounty

 Top earners in 1962 for Adjusted USA Box Office:

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35 thoughts on “1962 Top Box Office Movies”

  3. Finding box office information for films made before 1980 isn’t that difficult. You note the Variety year-end issue published Jan.1963, but Variety showed rentals accrued for films, not grosses. In its year-end issue, Variety published a list of “All-Time Box Office Champs” well into the 1980s. That list included every film that made at least $4,000,000 in rentals. By the mid-1980s, that made for a very long list. Much of the rentals were estimates by Variety, but the list was a generally accurate view of box office performance. I still have some copies of year-end issues from the 1980s, I think. Some searching would be in order. What you show for grosses in many cases doesn’t jibe with the rentals figures. For instance, your chart shows Mutiny on the Bounty having grossed $28 million; the Variety rentals figure is $7.4 million for 1962. Mutiny on the Bounty opened late in 1962, was in roadshow engagements into 1963, may have reached $10 million in domestic rentals, but $28 million as gross seems high. Conversely, the gross for How the West Was Won seems low. BTW, How the West Was Won didn’t open in the United States until Feb. 1963, according to the Internet Movie Data Base.

    Dr. No didn’t perform outstandingly in North America in its initial run. Wikipedia cites a figures of $2 million in rentals, which seems about right. So the $16.1 milling figure for the gross box office is too high. The International box office is what prompted United Artists to green-light a second installment, and the franchise went on to make history.

    Also the inflation-adjusted figures are way out of line. According to the National association of Theatre Owners website, the average price of a movie ticket in 1963 was $.86; the average price of a movie ticket in 2019 was $9.16, about a 10-to-1 multiplier (actually 10.65-to-1), so the Lawrence of Arabia figure would be the equivalent of ca. $442 million in 2019 dollars. There hasn’t been much inflation in ticket prices since 2019, because of Covid. How the West was Won $384.5 million in 2019 dollars, etc. While a case can be made for those films being shown at higher ticket prices in “roadshow” engagements, the figure from NATO would include those prices as well.

    As history, box office performances are fairly trivial, except for film fans, but history should strive to be accurate.

    Reply

    1. Hey Jay. I sadly do not have any box office information on Mothra. Once I uncover that nugget I will add Mothra to the page. Thanks for the feedback.

      Reply

  5. 76 Tender Is The Night (1962)
    Nominee
    Oscar Best Music, Original Song
    Sammy Fain (music)
    Paul Francis Webster (lyrics)
    For the song “Tender Is the Night (1962)”

    Reply

    1. Hey Sidney….hmmm….Tender Is The Night now has the Oscar nomination you mentioned…not sure why I did not respond back to your observation….but thank you. You are the man.

      Reply

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