So jump in the Cogerson Time Machine and let’s go back to January 1966. If you were a film buff back then and interested in knowing box office grosses you were pretty much out of luck. USA Today and their weekend box office report was still 16 years away. Box Office Mojo and their daily reporting was still 32 years away and Ultimate Movie Rankings was still 45 years away from existing.
Nope…back then your main source of information was Variety magazine. Now….granted you could see how a movie was doing in big cities like New York and Los Angeles on a weekly basis…that is…. if you could find a copy of Variety back then. That might have scratched the itch a little bit…but it had to be frustrating trying to keep track of how a movie was doing by only knowing how it did in a few select cities.
So with the lack of information out there…..Variety’s yearly anniversary issues had to be the highlight of the year for box office treasure hunters. Usually published in the first week of January….the anniversary issue listed the Top Box Office Rental movies of the year and an All Time Box Office Rental Champ list. Well over the years we have collected almost all of the Variety anniversary issues from 1940 to 1980. There is lots of box office gold in those magazines. Since we have fun looking at those yearly lists….we thought it would be a good idea to do a page that showed the Top 100 Rental movies of all-time. The following table was from Variety’s January 6th, 1966 issue.
Top 100 All Time 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 movies by the studios that made the movies
- Sort movies by the stars of he movies
- Sort movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort 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 movie received.
- Sort 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.
| Rank | Movie (Year) | Studio | UMR Co-Star Link | Box Office Rentals | Critic Audience Rating | Oscar Nom / Win | UMR Score |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gone with the Wind (1939) | MGM | Clark Gable & Vivien Leigh | 41,200,000 | 90.00% | 13 / 08 | 95.30 | |
| Ben-Hur (1959) | MGM | Charlton Heston | 38,600,000 | 88.67% | 12 / 11 | 94.67 | |
| Ten Commandments, The (1956) | Paramount | Charlton Heston & Vincent Price | 34,200,000 | 85.00% | 07 / 01 | 81.10 | |
| Mary Poppins (1964) | Disney | Julie Andrews & Dick Van Dyke | 28,500,000 | 81.00% | 13 / 05 | 84.70 | |
| Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | United Artists | David Niven & Shirley MacLaine | 23,500,000 | 70.50% | 08 / 05 | 85.34 | |
| Cleopatra (1963) | 20th Century Fox | Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton | 23,000,000 | 47.33% | 09 / 04 | 67.88 | |
| How the West Was Won (1963) | MGM | Gregory Peck & Debbie Reynolds | 22,000,000 | 76.00% | 08 / 03 | 78.47 | |
| Sound of Music, The (1965) | 20th Century Fox | Julie Andrews & Christopher Plummer | 20,000,000 | 82.33% | 10 / 05 | 91.70 | |
| Goldfinger (1964) | United Artists | Sean Connery | 19,700,000 | 81.00% | 00 / 00 | 69.07 | |
| My Fair Lady (1964) | Warner Brothers | Rex Harrison & Audrey Hepburn | 19,000,000 | 83.00% | 12 / 08 | 92.01 | |
| West Side Story (1961) | United Artists | Natalie Wood & Rita Moreno | 19,000,000 | 80.00% | 11 / 10 | 90.60 | |
| It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) | United Artists | Spencer Tracy & Mickey Rooney | 17,500,000 | 76.00% | 06 / 01 | 71.59 | |
| Robe, The (1953) | 20th Century Fox | Richard Burton & Jean Simmons | 17,500,000 | 62.50% | 05 / 02 | 74.08 | |
| South Pacific (1958) | 20th Century Fox | Mitzi Gaynor & Ray Walston | 17,500,000 | 73.00% | 03 / 01 | 68.98 | |
| Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957) | Columbia | William Holden & Alec Guinness | 17,193,000 | 88.00% | 08 / 07 | 93.56 | |
| Tom Jones (1963) | United Artists | Albert Finney | 16,150,000 | 69.50% | 10 / 04 | 85.06 | |
| Longest Day, The (1962) | 20th Century Fox | John Wayne & Robert Mitchum | 15,100,000 | 82.50% | 05 / 02 | 81.61 | |
| Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Columbia | Peter O'Toole & Anthony Quinn | 15,000,000 | 91.50% | 10 / 07 | 96.00 | |
| This is Cinerama (1952) | Cinerama | Lowell Thomas | 15,000,000 | 72.50% | 01 / 00 | 65.47 | |
| Carpetbaggers, The (1964) | Paramount | Alan Ladd | 14,500,000 | 61.00% | 00 / 00 | 59.67 | |
| Greatest Show on Earth, The (1952) | Paramount | Charlton Heston & James Stewart | 14,000,000 | 64.00% | 05 / 02 | 79.28 | |
| Spartacus (1960) | Universal Studios | Kirk Douglas & Laurence Olivier | 14,000,000 | 88.00% | 06 / 04 | 80.91 | |
| Guns of Navarone, The (1961) | Columbia | Gregory Peck & Anthony Quinn | 12,500,000 | 84.33% | 07 / 01 | 80.79 | |
| Seven Wonders of the World (1956) | Cinerama | Lowell Thomas | 12,500,000 | 75.00% | 00 / 00 | 66.25 | |
| From Here to Eternity (1953) | Columbia | Burt Lancaster & Montgomery Clift | 12,200,000 | 81.50% | 13 / 08 | 87.55 | |
| Cinerama Holiday (1955) | Cinerama | John Marsh | 12,000,000 | 75.00% | 00 / 00 | 66.25 | |
| El Cid (1961) | AA | Charlton Heston & Sophia Loren | 12,000,000 | 82.00% | 03 / 00 | 72.61 | |
| Giant (1956) | Warner Brothers | Elizabeth Taylor & James Dean | 12,000,000 | 86.00% | 10 / 01 | 84.65 | |
| White Christmas (1954) | Paramount | Bing Crosby & Danny Kaye | 12,000,000 | 78.00% | 01 / 00 | 68.06 | |
| Quo Vadis (1951) | MGM | Robert Taylor & Deborah Kerr | 11,750,000 | 75.00% | 08 / 00 | 78.08 | |
| Samson and Delilah (1950) | Paramount | Victor Mature & Directed by Cecil B. DeMille | 11,500,000 | 63.50% | 05 / 02 | 64.04 | |
| Duel in the Sun (1946) | Selznick | Gregory Peck & Jennifer Jones | 11,300,000 | 70.00% | 02 / 00 | 64.70 | |
| Irma La Douce (1963) | United Artists | Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine | 11,250,000 | 79.00% | 03 / 01 | 71.80 | |
| Best Years of Our Lives, The (1946) | RKO | Fredric March & Myna Loy | 11,200,000 | 86.00% | 08 / 07 | 92.62 | |
| Peyton Place (1957) | 20th Century Fox | Lana Turner & Lloyd Nolan | 11,050,000 | 65.50% | 09 / 00 | 72.13 | |
| Psycho (1960) | Paramount | Anthony Perkins & Directed by Alfred Hitchcock | 11,000,000 | 92.00% | 04 / 00 | 75.84 | |
| Sayonara (1957) | Warner Brothers | Marlon Brando & James Garner | 10,500,000 | 83.33% | 10 / 04 | 83.32 | |
| Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) | Disney | Walt Disney | 10,400,000 | 90.00% | 01 / 00 | 73.70 | |
| Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) | MGM | Marlon Brando & Trevor Howard | 9,800,000 | 70.67% | 07 / 00 | 75.64 | |
| Shaggy Dog, The (1959) | Disney | Fred MacMurray & Jean Hagen | 9,600,000 | 66.00% | 00 / 00 | 62.02 | |
| Operation Petticoat (1959) | Universal Studios | Cary Grant & Tony Curtis | 9,500,000 | 77.33% | 01 / 00 | 67.75 | |
| Parent Trap (1961) | Disney | Maureen O'Hara & Hayley Mills | 9,400,000 | 79.00% | 02 / 00 | 69.55 | |
| Apartment, The (1960) | United Artists | Jack Lemmon & Shirley MacLaine | 9,300,000 | 87.50% | 10 / 05 | 94.12 | |
| Cinderella (1950) | Disney | Walt Disney | 9,250,000 | 85.00% | 03 / 00 | 72.15 | |
| Absent Minded Professor (1961) | Disney | Fred MacMurray | 9,100,000 | 70.00% | 03 / 00 | 65.10 | |
| 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1954) | Disney | Kirk Douglas & James Mason | 9,000,000 | 82.00% | 03 / 02 | 71.94 | |
| Auntie Mame (1958) | Warner Brothers | Rosalind Russell | 9,000,000 | 85.00% | 06 / 00 | 83.85 | |
| Caine Mutiny, The (1954) | Columbia | Humphrey Bogart & Fred MacMurray | 8,700,000 | 85.50% | 07 / 00 | 80.73 | |
| Exodus (1960) | United Artists | Paul Newman | 8,700,000 | 67.50% | 03 / 01 | 64.52 | |
| King and I, The (1956) | 20th Century Fox | Yul Brynner & Deborah Kerr | 8,500,000 | 77.00% | 09 / 05 | 84.29 | |
| Lover Come Back (1961) | Universal Studios | Rock Hudson & Doris Day | 8,500,000 | 79.00% | 01 / 00 | 68.53 | |
| This Is The Army (1943) | Warner Brothers | Ronald Reagan | 8,500,000 | 60.50% | 03 / 01 | 61.24 | |
| Mister Roberts (1955) | Warner Brothers | Henry Fonda & James Cagney | 8,500,000 | 88.00% | 03 / 01 | 80.91 | |
| That Touch of Mink (1962) | Universal Studios | Cary Grant & Doris Day | 8,500,000 | 69.33% | 03 / 00 | 64.79 | |
| From Russia With Love (1964) | United Artists | Sean Connery | 8,400,000 | 83.33% | 00 / 00 | 70.17 | |
| Lady and the Tramp (1955) | Disney | Walt Disney | 8,300,000 | 81.00% | 00 / 00 | 69.07 | |
| Swiss Family Robinson (1960) | Disney | John Mills | 8,100,000 | 81.50% | 00 / 00 | 69.30 | |
| Battle Cry (1955) | Warner Brothers | Van Heflin & Aldo Ray | 8,000,000 | 59.50% | 01 / 00 | 59.36 | |
| Bells of St. Mary's, The (1945) | RKO | Bing Crosby & Ingrid Bergman | 8,000,000 | 87.00% | 08 / 01 | 82.44 | |
| Guys and Dolls (1956) | MGM | Marlon Brando & Frank Sinatra | 8,000,000 | 77.00% | 04 / 00 | 70.66 | |
| Jolson Story, The (1946) | Columbia | Larry Parks | 8,000,000 | 75.50% | 06 / 02 | 70.08 | |
| King of Kings (1961) | MGM | Jeffrey Hunter & Robert Ryan | 8,000,000 | 75.00% | 00 / 00 | 66.25 | |
| Music Man, The (1962) | Warner Brothers | Robert Preston & Ron Howard | 8,000,000 | 79.50% | 06 / 01 | 81.86 | |
| Old Yeller (1958) | Disney | Dorothy McGuire | 8,000,000 | 81.50% | 00 / 00 | 69.30 | |
| Shane (1953) | Paramount | Alan Ladd & Van Heflin | 8,000,000 | 87.50% | 06 / 01 | 81.87 | |
| Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) | MGM | Paul Newman & Elizabeth Taylor | 7,950,000 | 85.00% | 06 / 00 | 81.98 | |
| Some Like It Hot (1959) | United Artists | Marilyn Monroe & Jack Lemmon & Tony Curtis | 7,800,000 | 91.67% | 06 / 01 | 80.83 | |
| Pinocchio (1940) | Disney | Walt Disney | 7,700,000 | 90.50% | 02 / 02 | 75.54 | |
| Pillow Talk (1959) | Universal Studios | Rock Hudson & Doris Day | 7,500,000 | 83.67% | 05 / 01 | 74.79 | |
| Trapeze (1956) | United Artists | Burt Lancaster & Tony Curtis | 7,500,000 | 63.50% | 00 / 00 | 60.84 | |
| Unsinkable Molly Brown, The (1964) | MGM | Debbie Reynolds | 7,500,000 | 69.00% | 06 / 00 | 60.69 | |
| V.I.P.s, The (1963) | MGM | Elizabeth Taylor & Richard Burton | 7,500,000 | 53.00% | 01 / 01 | 46.26 | |
| World of Suzie Wong, The (1960) | Paramount | William Holden | 7,500,000 | 68.50% | 00 / 00 | 63.20 | |
| How To Marry A Millionaire (1953) | 20th Century Fox | Marilyn Monroe & Lauren Bacall | 7,300,000 | 80.33% | 01 / 00 | 69.16 | |
| Alamo, The (1960) | United Artists | John Wayne & Richard Widmark | 7,200,000 | 63.67% | 07 / 01 | 71.07 | |
| No Time for Seargeants (1958) | Warner Brothers | Andy Griffith | 7,200,000 | 78.50% | 00 / 00 | 67.89 | |
| Peter Pan (1953) | Disney | Walt Disney | 7,200,000 | 78.00% | 00 / 00 | 67.66 | |
| To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) | Universal Studios | Gregory Peck & Robert Duvall | 7,200,000 | 90.33% | 08 / 03 | 87.09 | |
| What's New, Pussycat (1965) | United Artists | Peter O'Toole & Woody Allen | 7,150,000 | 46.50% | 01 / 00 | 51.51 | |
| David and Bathsheba (1951) | 20th Century Fox | Gregory Peck & Susan Hayward | 7,100,000 | 50.67% | 05 / 00 | 56.81 | |
| For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) | Paramount | Gary Cooper & Ingrid Bergman | 7,100,000 | 76.50% | 09 / 01 | 77.91 | |
| Hatari! (1962) | Paramount | John Wayn & Directed by Howard Hawks | 7,100,000 | 71.67% | 01 / 00 | 65.08 | |
| Not as a Stranger (1955) | United Artists | Frank Sinatra & Robert Mitchum | 7,100,000 | 56.00% | 01 / 00 | 57.72 | |
| Oklahoma! (1955) | RKO | Gordon MacRae & Shirley Jones | 7,100,000 | 77.50% | 04 / 02 | 70.22 | |
| Son of Flubber (1963) | Disney | Fred MacMurray | 7,100,000 | 73.00% | 00 / 00 | 65.31 | |
| Shenandoah (1965) | Universal Studios | James Stewart | 7,000,000 | 75.33% | 01 / 00 | 60.39 | |
| Gigi (1958) | MGM | Leslie Caron & Directed by Vincent Minnelli | 6,750,000 | 68.00% | 09 / 09 | 84.56 | |
| Come September (1961) | Universal Studios | Rock Hudson & Gina Lollobrigida | 6,500,000 | 74.50% | 00 / 00 | 66.02 | |
| Country Girl, The (1954) | Paramount | Bing Crosby & Grace Kelly & William Holden< | 6,500,000 | 77.00% | 07 / 02 | 77.94 | |
| Going My Way (1944) | Paramount | Bing Crosby | 6,500,000 | 75.00% | 10 / 07 | 88.25 | |
| High Society (1956) | MGM | Bing Crosby & Frank Sinatra & Grace Kelly | 6,500,000 | 74.00% | 02 / 00 | 66.58 | |
| I'll Cry Tomorrow (1955) | MGM | Susan Hayward | 6,500,000 | 77.50% | 04 / 01 | 69.62 | |
| Imitation of Life (1959) | Universal Studios | Lana Turner | 6,500,000 | 80.00% | 02 / 00 | 69.40 | |
| Snows of Kilimanjaro, The (1952) | 20th Century Fox | Gregory Peck & Susan Hayward | 6,500,000 | 64.33% | 02 / 00 | 62.04 | |
| 101 Dalmatians (1961) | Disney | Walt Disney | 6,400,000 | 84.50% | 00 / 00 | 70.71 | |
| Sandpiper, The (1965) | MGM | Richard Burton & Elizabeth Taylor | 6,400,000 | 35.00% | 01 / 01 | 38.78 | |
| Suddenly, Last Summer (1959) | Columbia | Katharine Hepburn & Elizabeth Taylor | 6,375,000 | 72.50% | 03 / 00 | 66.27 | |
| Nun's Story, The (1959) | Warner Brothers | Audrey Hepburn | 6,300,000 | 84.50% | 08 / 00 | 82.54 | |
| War and Peace (1956) | Paramount | Audrey Hepburn & Henry Fonda | 6,250,000 | 58.50% | 03 / 00 | 61.56 | |
| Picnic (1955) | Columbia | William Holden | 6,200,000 | 65.00% | 06 / 02 | 71.90 |
We resisted the temptation to turn these rental numbers into adjusted gross numbers. It took a lot of effort…plus it would have messed up all the grosses already in our database.
The top 100 movies of all time as of 1966, US/Canada rentals, would have been even more interesting if it were worldwide rentals or even better, grosses.
Good to see epic of epics Ben-Hur riding high on the charts and topping The Ten Commandments in rentals… until they were bioth successfully re-issued again in the 1970s and Ten Commandments took the lead, methinks?
And there’s that film again… 😉
I’ve seen 72 of the 100 movies listed. Not bad eh? [cue yawns]
The top 10 on the critics chart is pretty amazing, all big favorites of mine. Good to see old Hitch topping all those great movies. Psycho is his highest rated movie on my Hitchcock top 30 video, and I have not problems with that at all.
A fascinating page Bruce. I was expecting to see the top rentals of 1966 instead but this is good too. The Sound of Music was the biggest hit of the latter half of the 1960s, Doctor Zhivago was huge too.
Vote Up!
Hey Steve…I resisted putting adjusted grosses on the page…mainly because I wanted to show what was considering the Avatar and Star Wars of the 1960s. Your boy, Chuck, was Harrison Ford twenty years before Ford got labeled the biggest box office star. 4 movies in the Top 27…truly impressive.
Wow your tally is in fourth place….behind Dan’s 97, my 86 and Flora’s 84. Glad you like the critic/audience Top 10….I agree….some all time great classics there.
I figure I am just going to write pages that feature Best Years Of Our Lives until you finally watch it…lol. As always thanks for stopping by and commenting.
HI BRUCE
1 Very interesting to see box office figures cast in the old format – just rentals unadjusted for inflation.
2 I think your table clearly illustrates how misleading the Variety all times greatest rentals chart was. For example $14 million in rentals is quoted for the 1960 Spartacus whereas its 1st year total domestic GROSS was thought to be about $24 million (rentals of $10.5) which at 1966 ticket prices would have translated into a domestic gross of over $50 million and worldwide Spartacus was quoted as having an adjusted gross of over $100 million at 1966 ticket prices. In short the chart you have reproduced did not give much of an inkling of each film’s true popularity in relation to all of the others.
Hey Bob
1. Glad you found this list interesting.
2. Just wanted to show what movie people like us….had to deal with back then.
3. You are 100% correct….this table is very misleading. I wish there was a way to calculate what the adjusted gross was back then….but my database would not support conflicting numbers…though WoC showed me a way to do it….but I kept screwing things up in the database….so I stopped before I did any really damage…lol.
4. I think an even better example than the Spartacus you commented on… is Come September (1961) and Going My Way (1944)…well Variety has them listed as being tied in the high 80s with $6.5 million in rentals….when you do the adjusted gross…..Come September has a gross of $211 million…which is awesome….but very little compared to Going My Way’s $489 million.
5. I am sure somebody back in January 1966 got that list…and quickly began to pick it apart.
Good stuff as aways.
HI BRUCE
1 Two other problems compounding the limitations of the Variety charts were
(1) They gave no idea of the phasing of the rental income which was irrelevant to them as they were not attempting to adjust for inflation. For example Spartacus is said to have initially made domestic rentals of $10.5 million but re-release took it up to the $14 million quoted in your chart reproduction.
(2) Journalists have complained that the studios didn’t often come clean about a movie’s rentals and especially did not always appear to think it worthwhile to report re-release rentals. It is thought that they saw publicity value in reporting only the larger figures that the initial release usually generated.
2 Some of the old problems persist today for the student of historical stats but your site is ‘as good as it gets’ in the matter as you deal in total grosses adjusted for inflation and take account of reruns and worldwide grosses as far as you can. Also of course if you wish to cross-check your figures have many more sources available to you today via the internet etc
than were provided for the stats student in the old days. So keep up the valuable work.
HELLO AGAIN BRUCE
1 I should amplify para 1 (1) of my previous post by saying that Variety’s charts also misled me into seriously underestimating the large volume of historical hits that stars like Wayne, Gable and Stewart had chalked up by the time I stated to follow the Variety charts in the 1970s. That was because those charts listed only those films from previous years which had generated at least $4 million in domestic rentals.
2 Accordingly a Tracy movie which had for example earned domestic rentals of $3 million in 1940 would not be listed by Variety and yet such a move would have been a massive hit in its day and your charts would today show it as having a buoyant adjusted domestic gross of probably over $220 million. The consequence of all this was that for years I mistakenly believed that the then more modern stars like Elizabeth Taylor who were getting a greater number of films into the Variety charts because of increased ticket prices had actually accumulated more hits than the stars of earlier times.
Hey Bob….true….if you look at this list…you will see one Clark Gable movie…but at that time Gable should have 5% of the movies on the list. As Boom Town, Test Pilot, San Francisco and Saratoga were bigger hits than Picnic the 100th movie on the above list.
When looking at Spencer Tracy…he would have had 6 movies better than Picnic. If you looked at the above chart…you would wonder why Tracy and Gable were stars. You are right….looking at the above table…Elizabeth Taylor puts those other legends to shame with 7 movies on the above list.
It is amazing how a list like this…which was probably hailed as gospel back in January 1966….was so misleading. Good stuff as always.
Hey Bob…(1) I agree good points….especially about Spartacus. (2) Yep…the studios were very close minded when it came to share box office grosses….too bad they did not realize all the free publicity they would have gotten by sharing the information. (3) Yep the internet…offers lots more information…than our counterparts back in the 1960s had. (4) Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this page….ultimately it is still a very fun page to look at.
I have seen 97 of them including the 3 Cinerama documentaries at 19, 24 & 26. What have I missed, believe it or not all Disney cartoons, 101 Dalmatians, Lady and the Tramp and yes I have never seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. I think part of the Disney problem is when I was a kid Disney’s The Wonderful World of Disney would use segments from all these films in some themed show, like maybe great heroes or something.
Hey Dan….well so far….we have had tallies of 84 (Flora) 86 (me) and now 97 (you)….seems that high tallies will be expected from the movie buffs that come to this site. I imagine your 97 will be hard to top. Wow….the three missing are all Disney Classics…I thought every child on Earth was required by law to watch those movies…lol. My kids are aged 28 to 7…it is amazing…the older kids (now all in their 20s) loved those Disney Classics…..and now my young ones (10 & 7) can’t even be bothered to watch them….they do not like the hand drawn animation…to them it is computer animation or bust. Thanks for checking out this page….I think it is a fun one to look at.
Well this is something different. I like it. Boy Charlten Heston is all over the top of the rankings. 4 movies in the Top 27! I had no idea El Cid was so popular. Lots of Disney movies no real surprise there.
I have seen 84 of these movies. The highest ranking film I have een is Gone With the Wind. The highest ranking film I have *not* seen This Is Cinerama. The lowest ranking film I have seen is Picnic. There are a lot of favourites on this list.
Hey Flora….84…is pretty darn impressive…let me see how many I have seen….counting 86….so just barely ahead of you….I have actually seen about 5 of these in the last 6 months….and that was enough to put me over the top. I also have not seen #19 This Is Cinerama…..my tally will be going to 87 soon….as I finally tracked down a DVD of White Christmas….which is a movie that I have somehow managed to not see. Glad this page pulled our some of your favorites…as always…thanks for the visit and the comment.