Want to know the best Peter Fonda movies? How about the worst Peter Fonda movies? Curious about Peter Fonda box office grosses or which Peter Fonda movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Peter Fonda movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Peter Fonda (1940-2019) was an Oscar®-nominated American actor, director, writer and producer. He was the son of Henry Fonda, younger brother of Jane Fonda, and father of Bridget. His most well known movie was playing Wyatt in 1969’s Easy Rider. Fonda’s IMDb page shows 116 acting credits from 1962 to 2020. This page will rank 44 Peter Fonda movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, cameos and movies that were not released in North American and a handful of his movies that we could not find box office on, were not included in the rankings. This page was requested by UMR Hall of Famer Flora.
Peter Fonda Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.
Peter Fonda 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 Peter Fonda movies by his co-stars
- Sort Peter Fonda movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
- Sort Peter Fonda movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Peter Fonda 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 Peter Fonda movie received.
- Sort Peter Fonda 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.
Reminder that this Sunday, TCM is airing a double feature of Peter Fonda movies as a memorial tribute starting at 8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific: Ulee’s Gold, followed by Easy Rider.
TCM is airing a Memorial Tribute double feature on Sunday, September 15th:
8pm Eastern/5pm Pacific: Ulee’s Gold
10pm Eastern/7pm Pacific: Easy Rider
I’ve never seen Ulee’s Gold before, so I’m looking forward to it. I double-checked to see whether it airs in Canada or not and it does. There are some titles which TCM does not own the rights to air in Canada.
TCM also has a memorial tribute video that can be found on Youtube as well as airing on the station itself.
Hey Flora…good to see TCM is doing a Memorial Tribute to Peter Fonda. I always thought Peter was channeling his dad, Henry Fonda, when he did Ulee’s Gold. His performance is exactly how i think Henry would have done the role….and it got Peter his only Oscar acting nomination. Hope Canada has the rights to the movie so you can see it. Good information…thanks for sharing.
I just realized there is a mistake in the paragraph talking about Peter Fonda being Oscar-nominated. It is true that he did not win Best Actor for Ulee’s Gold. However, Peter Fonda DID win Best Screenplay for Easy Rider.
Hey Flora. Peter Fonda got a nomination for writing Easy Rider, but it lost out to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That was William Goldman’s first Oscar win. So sadly for Mr. Fonda he never took home the Oscar. But two nominations is pretty awesome. That is two more than my beloved Bruce Willis. Thanks for returning to our Peter Fonda tribute page.
In my view Easy Rider alone historically cements Peter’s place as an important member of the talented Fonda clan. Accordingly in Part 2 is an appreciation which I quite liked from the pen of English writer and journalist Ed Vulliamy which was published yesterday in the British Guardian/Observer newspapers. It seeks to set within a historical context the work and life of Peter.
PERSONAL NOTES
Albert Camus [my own fave ‘serious’ author] with whom Peter is in ways compared in the appreciation was a renowned French philosopher, journalist and writer whose novels The Fall, A Happy Death and The Plague are highly-acclaimed important works of literature. The Fall is probably my favourite novel of all-time and certainly the one which had the greatest influence on me as a young man – yes: even greater to this day than Joel’s book!
The Fall tells of a famous and wealthy Parisian lawyer [Jean-Baptiste Clamence] who descends into the life of a reclusive barfly when he comes to regard his past life as highly hypocritical. In a monologue throughout the book he uses passages something like the following to describe to a listener how the shock of the self-realisation of his own pomposity and hypocrisy led to his fall from society:
“Not for me the low shady valleys, as I saw myself as a man for the highest mountains. My sense of self-importance must have conveyed itself to others, who believed in it, because strangers would come up to me in the street and pretend to know me just to shake my hand.”
Sounds to me how guys like Hirsch may well think about themselves; but anyway I feel that the above and the appreciation in Part 2 are useful to record on Peter’s page as to my mind they illustrate how well-thought-of Peter is in wider literary/artistic circles, especially when in any manner he is bracketed with Camus, who at the age of 44 has been the second youngest person ever to win [in 1957] The Nobel Prize in Literature. Rest easy now o Rider.
APPRECIATION OF PETER FONDA-OBSERVER/GUARDIAN NEWSPAPERSSUN 18 AUG 2019
“Add today, high up the list of those iconic images of the 1960s, that of Peter Fonda in floral shirt and outrageous sideburns, riding free on his Harley, to a soundtrack of Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild.
Easy Rider was the 35mm celluloid Woodstock; it was the reckless hippy gypsies’ manifesto of endless asphalt ribbon. Of course it has dated, the fact that the road trip was funded by smuggling cocaine from Mexico has lost its romance, as has the whole – in retrospect grotesque – glorification of drugs. On the other hand, Fonda’s film was the first to portray LSD as a horror show. Either way, people my age watched Fonda on the edge of our seats, wanting to be him; to feel that liberation through wind and speed across America’s boundless space, to be by that camp fire. But we didn’t want to be attacked by club-wielding rednecks, we didn’t want the bad trip, and certainly didn’t want to be gunned down on a lonely road.
At a deeper level, Fonda’s hitting the open road was more than geographical and even cultural. It was existential: like Jack Kerouac, even Albert Camus, Fonda encouraged, inspired and – in another way – was responsible for that sense of self-imposed “un-belonging” that has propelled my life (for what that is worth) and, more importantly, some of the best writing and music of my generation.
A sense of exile in the land where you were born; a sense of identity that only feels at home when it is nowhere, or at least in between one place and another. Fonda practised this in his real life: he often said that motorcycles were his “only focus”; he loved sailing. Fonda’s candid memoir Don’t Tell Dad is a litany of confrontations with authority, in which he usually comes out on top – but their telling oozes a certain sorrow, albeit magnificent.”
ED VULLIAMY
Hey Bob…thanks for sharing this article from Ed Vulliamy…it is written very well. Good stuff.
Hey Bob….excellent comment on Peter Fonda. I agree with you about Easy Rider and Fonda’s legacy. Seems as long as I have been aware of movies…I have been aware of Easy Rider and Peter Fonda’s involvement in that movie. Easy Rider was the “Star Wars” of that generation. Albert Brooks’ Lost In America gives some nice tributes to the movie.
Good information on Albert Camus and The Fall. That sounds interesting…I liked how you connected it to Peter Fonda. Showing once again how well rounded you are on some many different subjects. Rest in Peace Peter Fonda.
HI BRUCE
Thanks for feedback.
I should add that Ulee’s Gold and The Limey are other Peter Fonda faves of mine. I’m pleased that respectively: (1) you gave them high 79% and 77% ratings and (2) listed them no 3 and 4 for Review in the table above.
Peter left behind a net worth of $40 million according to Celebrity Net Worth.
Hey Bob…I enjoyed Ulee’s Gold a lot. It took me awhile to finally see The Limey, and by the time I did…..I think the expectations were too high…..so it came in a little underwhelming for me. I get The Limey and Sexy Beast mixed up pretty often. The joys of getting older, I guess.
Hello,
So sorry to learn his death, for me only one film Easy Rider, the end of the sixty and the beginning of the seventy with something of freedom and new world….with a very sad end…
RIP Mister Peter Fonda
Vacances is my timing now
Bye
Pierre
,
Hey Pierre….thanks for checking out our Peter Fonda tribute page. Easy Rider and it’s success made him a star forever. Good point about “freedom and new world….with a very sad end.” Good thoughts on Mr. Fonda. RIP.