This movie page looks at 1936 Top Box Office Movies. Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult. For somebody looking for box office information on 1936 it is very very frustrating. Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 33,000 movies. So we figured we would show all the 1936 movies in our database.
To make this list a movie had to be made in 1936. Obviously many movies made in 1935 earned box office dollars in 1936. On the other side many movies made in 1936 made money in 1937 and later. This page will looks at 152 1936 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.
The following massive table only includes the movies made in 1936 that are in our database. Since we are constantly adding new movies to our database….this page will quickly become obsolete. We will try and update this page on a regular basis.
Our UMR Top 50 of 1936
1936 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 1936 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
- Sort 1936 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
- Sort 1936 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
- Sort 1936 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 and how many Oscar® wins each 1936 Top Box Office Movies received.
- Sort 1936 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.
My Main Sources
Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers
Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers
Source 3: William Schaefer Warner Brothers Ledgers
Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions
Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1942 by Tino Balio
Source 6: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon
Source 7: Wikipedia
Source 8: IMDb.com
Source 9: “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy
Source 10: Hollywood Power Stats by Christopher Reynolds
Charles Boyer is not in The Prisoner of Shark Island.
Hey Dan….thanks for the catch. When I was typing that in…..my Spidey sense was saying something was wrong….I guess I should have listened….lol. Will fix that errror when I get home from work.
Hey Dan….that error has been fixed….one again….thanks for the headsup.
I have seen 36 films from 1936.
Top 10 Favourite movies include:
San Francisco
My Man Godfrey
Libelled Lady
Dodsworth
Under Two Flags
After The Thin Man
Born to Dance
Sabotage
Swing Time
The Petrified Forest
The highest box office film I’ve seen is 1: San Francisco.
The lowest rated box office film I’ve seen is 132: Rembrandt.
Hey Flora….thanks for the visit, comment and tally. I have seen 21 of these movies to your 36. I have seen 7 of your Top 10. After the Thin Man and The Petrified Forest are two of my favorites as well. My lowest rated movie seen was Things to Come…which is one of Steve’s favorites. Good feedback as always.
152 films! My recent Clint Eastwood Top 50 looks puny by comparison. 🙂
I’ve seen 28 of the 152 films listed. Favorites include – Charge of the Light Brigade, The Devil Doll, The Invisible Ray, Lloyds of London, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Modern Times, Sabotage, San Francisco, Show Boat, Swing Time, Tarzan Escapes and Things to Come.
Lots of favorites, it was a good movie year for me.
Top rated movies I haven’t seen yet – Dodsworth, Fury and The Great Ziegfeld.
Looking at my database there are 55 films from 1936 in movie collection –
After the Thin Man
Anthony Adverse
Big Brown Eyes
Born to Dance
Bullets or Ballots
Camille
Ceiling Zero
Charge of the Light Brigade
Charlie Chan at the Opera
Charlie Chan’s Secret
Conquest of the Air
Devil Doll ,The
Dracula’s Daughter
Fire Over England
Follow the Fleet
Fury
Garden of Allah ,The
General Died at Dawn ,The
Gold Diggers of 1937
Great Ziegfeld ,The
Invisible Ray ,The
Isle of Fury
King of the Pecos
Last of the Mohicans ,The
Libeled Lady
Lloyds of London
Man Who Changed His Mind ,The
Mary of Scotland
Mister/ Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
Modern Times
My Man Godfrey
Our Relations
Petrified Forest ,The
Plainsman ,The
Prisoner of Shark Island
Reefer Madness
Rembrandt
Romeo & Juliet
Sabotage
San Francisco
Satan Met a Lady
Secret Agent
Show Boat
Small Town Girl
Speed
Sweeney Todd
Swing Time
Tarzan Escapes
Things to Come
Trail of the Lonesome Pine
Under Two Flags
Walking Dead ,The
Wedding Present
Wife vs Secretary
Winds of the Wasteland
There’s a few there that isn’t on your chart and a bunch I still haven’t watched.
Epic work Bruce, that should keep the stats freaks happy for a few hours. Vote Up!
Hey Steve…thinking this is the biggest list of 1936 box office anywhere on the internet. Your massive Clint video should be pretty popular. Not sure how many people are searching for movies 81 years old.
I have seen 7 of your favorites. Sorry Things To Come did not rate higher. I think that movie gained momentum as the years passed.
Thanks for the feedback.
Let’s see you have seen 28 to my 21 but we both trail Flora’s 36. At least combined we have her best….. sometimes that does not happen….lol.
HI BRUCE
1 As you know I rely a lot on your annual reviews for my private statistical projects so I was wondering when we might get an other one
2 1936 is a good year with which to further expand the annual review series as it can boast such classics as San Francisco, Modern Times and Mr Deeds, not to mention Another Thin Woman!
3 I loved the miniature still of Old Cantankerous and the King sparring and I also admire the little poster from reproduction from Mr Deeds. However I hadn’t realised previously that Jean Arthur didn’t get equal billing to Coop in that one so I’ll have to remove it from Jean’s page in my own database.as I normally included in performers’ schedules just movies in which they have star billing. Remember “Less is more!” Anyway a warm welcom to the 1936 Annual Review.
CORRECTION TO MY PREVIOUS POST
I meant of course AFTER the, and not Another, Thin Woman.
Hey Bob….James Stewart, William Powell, me and the most successful box office actress of all-time forgive you for your mistake…lol.
Hey Bob
1. Glad you like this page…..between this page and our new Top 500 page….we have come to a conclusion….a different understanding between me and WoC has caused a major issue with consistency on the website.
2. I was thinking…we were holding off on using a new average ticket cost….well we are using the current price….which means everytime I produce a new page…those are the new box office estimates. I thought I had until 2018 before I would have to worry about updating all of these pages.
3. You have been noticing the minor differences….I guess I was using the ostrich with the head in the sand approach…by not really looking into the differences you were noticing.
4. Well the good news is…..I realize and more importantly WoC realized that with the size of this website….that is now impossible to update all of these pages fast enough……it took months to switch to the new UMR formula…(heck I still see some that are using the old formula…looking at lots of the director pages out there). So for the first time WoC is working hard on making this page dynamic. I am actually looking at her notes now…don’t understand them….but they are here.
5. So hopefully the “dynamic” train is back on the track. Which will include some UMR formula changes and a way to make our UMR score make more sense. Gotta get rid of the fact that average is 40. Thinking about a grade scale or a way to make the numbers make sense to someone seeing a table for the first time.
6. As for Jean Arthur….Capra loved her…..she was a huge part of the success of Mr. Deeds….seems unfair to drop her from your database…..but it is your database….you gotta go with what you believe is the right way to go.
Thanks for the feedback…..good stuff as always.
This was supposed to be an easy page to put together….instead it took hours and most of the night and morning….very frustrating…..but we now have yearly pages from 1936 to 1949…..not too bad.