*Bruce Willis is taking a break from acting as he battles aphasia, a neurological condition that affects the ability to communicate. 3/30/2022
Want to know the best Bruce Willis movies? How about the worst Bruce Willis movies? Curious about Bruce Willis’s box office grosses or which Bruce Willis movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Bruce Willis movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place.
I have followed Bruce Willis’ career since he hit the big time with his star making role as David Addison on Moonlighting. I still think the Moonlighting 3 episode story arc with Mark Harmon,was some the best television I have ever seen and the pinnacle of that series. Since Moonlighting, Bruce Willis has had a very busy career, making over 60 movies over the last 27 years. It has been a roller coaster ride…the highs….. movies like Pulp Fiction, most of the Die Hards, and The Sixth Sense…..the lows….movies like The Whole Ten Yards, Hudson Hawk, Bonfire of the Vanities and North. His IMDb page shows 145 acting credits since 1980. In the table below, Ultimate Movie Rankings ranks movies in 6 different sortable columns.
Bruce Willis Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews, and awards.
Bruce Willis 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 Bruce Willis movies by movie title and movie trailers.
- Sort Bruce Willis movies by co-stars of his movies.
- Sort Bruce Willis movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
- Sort Bruce Willis movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
- Sort Bruce Willis 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 Bruce Willis movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Bruce Willis movie won.
- Sort Bruce Willis 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.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Bruce Willis
1. Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in the town of Idar-Oberstein, West Germany. His dad was an American while his mother was a German.
2. Bruce Willis worked as a bartender when he was a struggling actor in New York City.
3. In 1984, Bruce Willis left New York City to audition for roles in Los Angeles.
4. Bruce Willis’ big break was getting the role in the television series Moonlighting (1985-1989). Glenn Gordon Caron had to fight with ABC to put Willis in the lead role having already signed Shepherd for both the pilot and series. Caron claims he tested Willis about a third of the way through testing over 2,000 actors, knew “this was the guy” immediately, and had to fight through twice as many more acting tests and readings while arguing with ABC executives before receiving (initial) conditional authorization to cast Willis in the pilot. ABC, according to Caron, did not feel that anyone viewing would think there could possibly be any “believable” sexual tension between Shepherd and Willis.
5. Although Bruce Willis was the 115th choice to play John McClane in 1988’s Die Hard….he was given an unheard, at the time, salary of $5 million dollars.
6. Bruce Willis was the only celebrity that attended Julia Roberts’ wedding to Daniel Moder. Their friendship is referred to in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), when he mistakes Tess Ocean for Julia Roberts, and asks her about ‘Danny’.
7. Bruce Willis was the first actor to ever “act” in a video game (Apocalypse (1998)). No one before had ever done voice work along with having their likeness and movements digitally added to the game, as well as receiving prominent billing on the game’s cover.
8. Bruce Willis was considered for the role of Kyle Reese in The Terminator (1984), which went to Michael Biehn.
9. Bruce Willis has been married two times. He has 5 daughters. His first marriage was to Demi Moore. His current marriage is to Emma Heming.
10. Check out Bruce Willis’ career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Personal Top Ten Bruce Willis Movies
- Die Hard
- The Fifth Element
- Looper
- Lucky Number Slevin
- Nobody’s Fool
- Pulp Fiction
- Sin City
- The Sixth Sense
- Twelve Monkeys
- Unbreakable
Our You Tube Video that goes through the Rankings all of Bruce Willis’ movies.
My Letterboxd.com Bruce Willis Movie Reviews.
Steve Lensman’s Bruce Willis Top 50 Movies You Tube Video
If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.
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However when the 25 extra movies are added-in they drag-down Mr Willis’ average Cogerson adjusted domestic gross to just $62 million per movie which is not so good a look and might seem to place him in the same low broad bracket in terms of stardom as for example Susan Sarandon, Kate Winslet and Charlize Theron.
Those 3 ladies have a combined career output of 157 movies to- date and the average adjusted Cogerson domestic gross per movie for that combined output of the 3 gals is $55 million.
Davis and Crawford hated each other and it seems were always quarrelling; but if there is one thing that the legendary Bette and her equally legendary contemporary Joan agreed upon it was:
“to be considered a REAL star you have to pull your weight at the box office” and that within that context many of today’s so-called female ‘stars’ couldn’t cut it and would have been considered mere starlets in the Hollywood Golden Era.
In my opinion the 3 ladies that I have mentioned whilst talented acting performers are not box-office and not one of them could usually ever open a film at the box-office on her own.
Brucie on the other hand was in his heyday what The Work Horse describes Dino Paul Crocitti as on his Cogerson page: “A Beast at the box office!”
For example the total adjusted Cogerson WORLDWIDE gross for the 5 Die Hard movies is a staggering $2.46 billion the average of which is just short of half a billion dollars per movie. Mr Willis took centre stage in that franchise as the King of the 4-Letter Words John McClane; and it takes a REAL star to carry a high-grossing series like that over a lengthy quarter of a century [1988-2013].
In adding the additional 25 movies to Bruce Willis’ stats page The Work Horse is as always attempting to provide as honest, impartial and complete a run-down of a star’s career as possible.
For me the problem with these additions -which I consider meaningless in terms of gauging the magnitude of his stardom in its heyday- is that whilst they add only a derisory 4 million dollars or so to the Willis box office totals they at the same time do the overall presentation of his box office performance no favours.
I do not have at my fingertips the sophisticated “all singing all dancing” facilities that site moderators like WH and Steve seem to have; but by my manual calculations the 80 or so earlier movies that Willis’ stats table was confined to have a combined adjusted domestic box office gross of $6.8 billion which converts to an overall average of $83 million per movie.
Over a massive total of 80 movies that is a highly respectable figure as the stats table of undoubted mega-legend Bette Davis demonstrates: over a career filmography of 79 movies in the Cogerson chart her average adjusted domestic gross per movie is $81 million.
I don’t think I’m anywhere close.
That is a huge upgrade. If you included True West then where is HBO’s The Return of Bruno?
I had avoided adding in Bruce’s low budget movies to this page….but with the last Willis movie completed….I realize it was time to include all of his movies….so we could be considered…”ultimate: My tally count of Bruce movies is 105. The only two I have missed are his Showtime Play True West and this year’s Gasoline Alley. Not thinking even Dan can top total of 105. Happy Easter.