This page is our attempt to list the All Time Top Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies. Potential problems? Box office reporting before Box Office Mojo and Box Office Guru is pretty weak. So many movies would probably crack this Top 250 list…but due to lack of international stats they were excluded from this table.
What you do have here, are the movies in our database (36,000 movies and growing) that have domestic AND international box office. Roughly 45% of the movies in our database have both box office totals…..but that means 55% or almost 20,000 only have domestic totals. So before exploring the massive table below….please realize that we know that sadly some blockbusters are not on this page. Thank you Paramount, Universal, Columbia, and 20th Century Fox for keeping crappy records back in the Golden Age of Hollywood.
All Time Top Worldwide Box Office 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 All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by movie titles and trailers
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by co-stars or directors
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by how many Oscar® nominations and Oscar® wins each movie received
- Sort All Time Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Grossing Movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score. UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
All the box office numbers are adjusted box office numbers.
This page is the brother page to our All-Time Domestic Ticket Selling Movies.
How many tickets has titanic sold?
Congratulations on another mammoth research project.
However, there are so many factors involved in accurately measuring the all-time grossing films. One is the cost of each film compared to the actual profit. Today’s digital-focused films are hugely expensive (perhaps on an average of $200 to $300 million budgets), which doesn’t even include publicity, prints, etc. Second, movie tickets in the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, etc. were much lower than today’s prices. Third, there was no television, cable, videos, or dvds during those eras, which affected how much more they earned. And last, but not least, it is unlikely that today’s mindless tech-focused films will be venerated, exhibited, or continue making earnings some 80 years from now.
Thank you for the opportunity to voice my personal opinion.
Hey Frank. Thanks for an awesome comment. Lots of great points in your comment. I think when comparing stats in different eras, it is always difficult. Each time frame has things that helped and hurt it’s results.
Overall, the pandemic has brought lots of use to our website. Two of our pages are not feeling that increase, this one and our all-time ticket selling one. I guess with no new movies people are not looking at the charts like they were before the virus caused all this chaos.
Our calculations take into account the different price of tickets that you mentioned. Using the rental number we calculate a gross. We divide that number by the average ticket price of the year the movie was released.That gets us tickets sold. Next we multiply tickets sold by today’s average ticket cost. Luckily my smart and better half has is all automated for me. Are used to do it all in a notebook now it is in a computer database.
Hopefully we will all be here in 80 years to see if you were right or wrong… LOL. Thanks for sharing your opinion on our website. Good stuff. All right time to get out second time
(just asking) How often do you update this list? Where’s ‘MI Fallout’?
Hey jordie. I try an update weekly for new movies. And once a year when the new average ticket price gets released…the entire website gets an update. As for Mission Impossible:Fallout…..I somehow missed that one. I am currently updating the page….so by the time you visit again….you will see it seating in 192nd place with an adjusted worldwide gross of $791.00 million. Good catch…and thanks for the headsup on it’s omission.
(I was that guy asking for box-office worldwide adjusted)
I have another request. I know it’s far-fetched.
It’s just that I’ve always wondered about the first release figures. And since a while the no-china figures.
It’s just that, for example, if I look at snow white’s first release, that film didn’t make 1 billion in the U.S., by far. Meaning, the original release might’ve made 100 million in the U.S. (maybe more, you get my point) in nowadays dollars (U.S. off course, as foreign didn’t seem to exist in the pre 50’s). (I’ve never seen foreign results for Snow White, yet you seem to have global results, where the hell did you get those?)
Snow white’s immensely box-office results are due to the film being outstandingly worth repeating. And I mean OUTSTANDINGLY, meaning probably only, and I seriously mean only, the original star wars is a bigger classic than bloody snow white.
And since last year, end game, without china and inflation, wouldn’t have beaten avatar, by far.
Hey Jordie. My domestic total comes from other websites like Box Office Mojo. One of the drawbacks of database…..is it has issues with multiple releases….so I have to figure the current adjusted total….and then work my way back to get a original release number. As for my worldwide total….that comes directly from C.J. Tevlin’s RKO ledgers. Those ledgers show Snow White earned almost 5 million in rentals during it’s intial release. That 5 million would be almost $700 million back then. Snow White was the Avatar of the 1930s. It was something that had never been seen before and people flocked to the theater…just like they did for Avatar. Hope that helps…sorry it took awhile to see this comment.
Wow. 700m. I mean, wow. Well….
I had no idea it was that big in theaters. I always thought it made money with both initial and re releases, just like I thought about gone with the wind. It seems that every feature makes most of the money with initial release.
Besides, US population in ’39 was 147m. So if gone with the wind and snow white had that high revenue, then the viewer percentage must’ve been like twice from the same revenue nowadays.
Besides besides, if gone with the wind makes 1.6b in US nowadays, the average US ticket price is about $9 nowadays, and the population of initial release was 147m, then the viewer percentage must’ve been like over 100%?
STEVE I read about 2 months ago that the official attitude of the movie industry towards stardom is:
1/a star’s PRIMARY duty is to “open” a film. Guys like Joel may think that it is to give 4 star performances but they are wrong.
2/by “opening” a movie the Industry means the star’s name should attract around $15 million or so gross in a movie’s opening weekend.
3/ie the star gets people out to see it in its first few days and after that it is up to positive “word of mouth’ to carry the film at the box office.
4/so that if a Tom Cruise film immediately earns $15 million or thereabouts but then collapses at the box office because of negative word of mouth Cruise is nevertheless considered to have done his duty and is not blamed for the flop.
Maybe though we’ll get to the stage where the star’s “duty” is to attract the first billion!!!
Hey Bob….good stuff….3 months later.