Top 100 Musicals

Sittin' on top of rankings is Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain
Sittin’ on top of rankings is Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain when looking at critic and audience rankings

Want to know the best Top 100 Musicals movies?  How about the worst Top 100 Musicals movies?  Curious about Top 100 Musicals box office grosses or which Top 100 Musicals movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Top 100 Musicals movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information…and alot more.

Over the years we have received many requests to do UMR pages on genres.  Besides doing a Sports movie page we have pretty much ignored those requests.  We ignored those requests because we could not figure out a way to put together a page on a whole genre. Recently we stumbled across a book called Musicals by Daniel Cohen.  In that book Cohen looked at the best of the best musicals from the 1920s to the mid 1980s.  At the end of the book was a filmography of all the movies in his book.  That seemed like a great starting point for us to finally do a UMR page on musicals. Here are rules we used when putting together this page.

(1) If Cohen listed the movie in his book…the movie made the page. (2) Although we are not really huge musical movie fans….a few of the musicals we actually like….did not make his book.  So we added our favorite musicals like Paint Your Wagon (Clint singing…. how did that not make the book?) and The Rocky Horror Picture show.  (3) Then we included movie musicals made after Cohen’s book was published.  (4) We did not include Biopics.  Yes movies like The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner’s Daughter and La Bamba have lots of music but almost all of it occurs on a stage or in a studio.  (5) We also did not include album movies like Purple Rain and Pink Floyd’s The Wall or most of the Disney animated classics….with the exception of Beauty and The Beast which was on every Best Musical Movie list we saw.  (6) In the end we actually ended up with way more than 100 movies….279 to be precise.  So since we researched them….we figured we would include them.  (7) Can’t find a musical on the table?  If it was before 1984….it is not our fault….you have to blame Daniel Cohen.  If the movie is made after 1984….then we will take the blame.  BUT….leave a comment detailing the missing movie…..and we will include it.  Enjoy!

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are well represented in this collection of Top 100 Musicals….13 Rogers movies made the list and 27 Astaire movies made the list.

Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movies by the stars of the movies
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by actual domestic box office grosses
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movie received.
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals 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.
  • Use the search and sort button to make this table very interactive.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Top 100 Musicals Table

  1. 194 Top 100 Musicals movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 69.53% of his movies listed. The Sound of Music (1965) was the biggest box office hit.
  2. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  224 of Top 100 Musicals’s movies are rated as good movies…or 80.28% of his movies.  Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the highest rated movie while At Long Last Love (1975) is lowest rated movie.
  3. 168 Top 100 Musicals movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 60.21% of his movies.
  4. 66 Top 100 Musicals movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 23.65% of his movies.
  5. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 235 Top 100 Musicals movie scored higher that average….or 84.22% of his movies. West Side Story (1961) got the the highest UMR Score while At Long Last Love (1975) got the lowest UMR Score.
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30

Possibly Interesting Facts About Top 100 Musicals

1. The combined adjusted domestic box office gross for these 279 movies is $48.67 BILLION!

2. The 279 movies on this table received 573 Oscar® nominations.

3. The 279 movies on this table won 146 Oscars®.

4. 34 of these movies received Best Picture Oscar® nominations

5. 8 of these movies won the Best Picture Oscar®.

6.  The Great Ziegfeld (1936), An American in Paris (1951), Gigi (1958), West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968) and Chicago (2002) are the 8 Best Picture Oscar® winners.

 

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.  Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.  Emmy® is a registered trademark.

If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.

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85 thoughts on “Top 100 Musicals”

  1. I have been browsing over this highly comprehensive excellent page from Bruce and it got me thinking. Although I was more into “cowboys and Indians” when I started watching movies in the early fifties and overall had not much interest in musicals there were exceptions.

    For example I liked Fred Astaire in The Band Wagon and Daddy Long Legs; Kelly and O’Connor in Singin in the Rain; Deanna Durbin; Doris Day; and all of the Danny Kaye comedies.

    As I say looking over the multitude of titles that Bruce has listed here [which brought back many nostalgic memories] started me thinking and some of the thoughts I jotted down are in the supplementary 4 parts to this post.

    Reply

  3. Should a movie like the Beatles’ (#55) ‘A Hard Days Night’ (1964), REALLY be included on a list of ‘Movie Musicals’?

    Yes, it has music, yes it is ‘musical’……but is it REALLY a musical (as defined by most of the other MUSICALS on this list)?

    Just askin’……..

    Reply

    1. Hey Mark….I think originally I did not include A Hard Days Night…..but it’s absence was picked up by lots of readers….so I went ahead and included it. It is not a standard musical…..but it was one of the first ever musical video movies ever made. But I agree with your comment…..it is a questionable inclusion for sure. Thanks for checking out our musical page.

      Reply

  4. great page, especially ranked by umr. finally someone who likes Paint Your Wagon. on my top 10 all time musical list.it might also make it to the top 10 list as a comedy. thanks for great job.

    Reply

  5. HI BRUCE

    1 I am doing a little private project on musicals and am using your musical stats page. I’d be grateful if you would confirm for me both the Actual AND adjusted figures for Judy’s Wizard of Oz.

    2. Judy’s own Cogerson page gives a different adjusted gross from the general musical one. Also the actual gross of $14.09 million on the musical page seems very high in 1939 for an adjusted gross of $226 million. For example Babes in Arms the same year has an actual gross of just $9.24 million against an adjusted figure of $279 million. Reruns can of course make direct comparisons impossible.

    3 Confirmation of the definitive figures will complete my exercise because everything else I’ve looked at on your highly comprehensive and very helpful musical page check out perfectly.

    MANY THANKS BOB

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….although this page has links it was one of the last pages done before the formula change. So I would use the numbers of Garland’s page. Though I imagine when I update this page lots of numbers will change. Glad our page is helping with your project.

      Reply

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