Top Grossing Movies of 1939

One of my dad's favorite movies was Gunga Din. Gunga Din starred one of my favorite actors of all-time...Cary Grant. Gunga Din was the 5th biggest box office hit of 1939.
One of the Top Grossing Movies of 1939 was Gunga Din starring Cary Grant.

This movie page looks at The Top Grossing Movies of 1939.  1939 is considered by many people to be the greatest year ever for movies.  So you would figure finding box office information on the greatest year in movie history would be pretty easy to find.  That however is simply not true!  The box office information that is out there for 1939 movies…..is sorry to say …..pretty damn weak!

Many sources list Gone With The Wind as the top grosser and list between 5 and 10 movies in a tie for 2nd place (like that happened). Others list the top grossing movies but do not included any figures (looking at you Wikipedia and Variety) to back up their rankings. There are many Top Ten 1939 box office hit lists out there…. but with the exception of Gone With The Wind as the number one movie grosser they all list different movies in different order.  For somebody looking for box office information on 1939 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 20,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1939 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1939.  Obviously many movies (Pygmalion and Angels Have Dirty Faces) made in 1938 earned box office dollars in 1939.  On the other side many movies made in 1939 made money in 1940 and later.  Gone With The Wind actually earned very little box office dollars 1939 but broke the bank in 1940 and many other years during its many re-releases.

This page will looks at over 190 Top Grossing Movies of 1939.  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.

John Wayne in Stagecoach. Stagecoach was Wayne's big break. Stagecoach was his first of many box office hits.
John Wayne in Stagecoach. Stagecoach was Wayne’s big break. Stagecoach was his first of many box office hits.

Our UMR Top 50 of 1939

Top Grossing Movies of 1939 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 Grossing Movies of 1939 by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.  If you want to see the 5 James Stewart movies on the table…just type in his name in the search box and up they will come
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 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 Grossing Movies of 1939 received.
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • If there is link in the co-star column….that link takes you to our UMR page for that performer

one With The Wind is easily the most famous movie of 1939...but did you know it opened in theaters in late December of 1939? So the most successful movie of all-time actually earned very little box office dollars in 1939.
Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in 1939’s Gone With The Wind

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: Variety Magazine – January 3rd 1940

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions – 1941,1942,1947,1954,1961,1968,1971,1974

Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939 by Tino Balio

Source 6:  Wikipedia – 1939 in film

Source 7:  IMDb.com

Source 8:  “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy

Source 9:  Professor Steve Lensman  Film Department Heston University.

Source 10:  Hundreds of autobiographies and biographies of star performers.  Sadly most of the time a book will say….”the movie did well at the box office or the movie did not perform as well as they were hoping”…those comments are no help at all…..but every once in awhile a book will give specific box office information.

How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1939….BoxOfficeMojo was not around to keep track of box office earnings. Back then earnings seem to be a secret and a secret that needed to be safely locked up.  When studios did report box office stats they used “box office rentals”.  Box office rentals were the amount of money the studio got back from the theaters.  It is NOT the box office gross.  I created a computer program that looked at box office rentals and known box office grosses in my database.  My program found over 2,000 movies that matched that criteria and came up with an average of 2.2.  Meaning that box office gross was 2.2 times greater than box office rentals.  It is not an exact calculation….but it is the multiplier I used to calculate the grosses.  For example:  Looking at my dad’s favorite movie, Gunga Din.  Gunga Din returned to RKO studies $2,012,000 million in box office rentals.  Using my multiplier of 2.2….I calculate that the box office gross was $4,430,000 million in 1939. 

If a big budget movie made $4.43 million today it would be considered a huge box office bomb (can you say The Adventures of Pluto Nash?).  To compare box office results from movies from different eras you have to use tickets sold as the common denominator.  Back in 1939 the average movie admission was .28 cents (Box Office Mojo says it is .23 cents…but I disagree with their number).  So you take the box office gross and divide it by average movie admission….in this case…$4.43 million divided by $.23 you get 15.8 million tickets sold in 1939. Now (have I lost you yet?) you take the average movie admission price today ($8.14) and multiply that by tickets sold.  15.8 * $8.14 = $128.61 million  So if Gunga Din was released this year it would earn about $128.61 million.  Gunga Din’s unadjusted box office total of 4.43 million would rank as the 153rd highest grossing film of 2014….right behind The Skelton Twins.  But if we look at Gunga Din’s adjusted box office total of $128.61 million…it would rank as the 23rd highest grossing movie of 2014….one spot ahead of Lucy.

The ones that got away.  There are so many more movies from 1939.  My Top Ten movies that I am still searching for their box office totals.  First Love, The Great Victor Herbert, The Man In The Iron Mask, Four Feathers, Thunder Afloat, 6,000 Enemies, Stand Up And Fight, and Yes, My Darling Daughter …..the seach continues.

My Yearly Review Pages

To see our adjusted worldwide box office grosses on over 70 1939 movies check out this page.

Worldwide Box Office Grosses – 1939

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36 thoughts on “Top Grossing Movies of 1939”

  1. You need to adjust the critical ranking for “Idiot’s Delight” to at least 73%.. It appeared on several “year’s best” lists, only omitted from more because of early ’39 release, It got outstanding reviews in NY Times, LA Times as well as major papers in Chicago, San Francisco, Boston and Philadelphia. The hard to please Brooklyn Eagle gave it and Shearer a rave.

    Reply

  3. Hello Bruce i just have some questions about Sherlock Holmes movies :

    1) do you have gross figures for “The Hound of the Baskerville” that was also released in 1939 ?

    2)What is the pre 2000’s Sherlock Holmes movie that performed the best at the worldwide box office ?

    Is it “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” from 1939 , the only one you have listed ? Or another one ?

    Thanks !

    Reply

    1. Hi Bruce, have you seen my question ? I just want to ask you about some Sherlock Holmes films …
      Basil Rathbone did a lot of Sherlock Holmes movies…14 i think …. For some fans he is Sherlock Holmes ! But i have only seen one Sherlock Holmes movie on your website it’s “The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes” released in 1939…
      I just want to know if you have some infos about the other Holmes movies that he did like “the hound of the baskerville” released also in 1939 …And what is the Sherlock Holmes movie release before 2000 that performed the best at the box office according to the sources in your database ?….
      Thanks a lot

      Reply

      1. I have written in my notes “The Hound of Baskersvilles” $366,000 rentals USA if that helps. I have no info on Worldwide …

        Reply

          1. Hey Chris….thanks for sharing this information…I just added The Hound of Baskersvilles to the database…and will showing up here as soon as our database updates…..it is a three part process….it is working on part one right now. It should end up ranked as the 80ish best movie of they year. Thanks so much for sharing this information.

      2. Hey Max…..I feel bad…I had not noticed this comment until today….when Chris responded to and provided some information. So using the stats Chris provided…we now have two of the Basil/Sherlock movies in the database. I will have to see if we have any more information on that series. Some of those series were popular….but not big enough hits to crack the Top Grossing Variety lists. The first two were produced with Fox….which has a decent amount of financial information out there….then Universal took over the franchise….and sadly information on their movies back then is weak at best. Still….I am sure the Harrison Reports could at least shed some light on how the movies performed. Once again…sorry for the delay….but the Hounds is now on the page…with a spot in the high 80s. Thank you Chris.

        Reply

        1. I also have in my notes “King of the Turf” at $185,000 …. Though I do not know where that figure came from. It obviously didn’t do very well and very little is written on it on the internet. The figure sounds about right for a movie like this, though.

          Reply

          1. Hey Chris. King of the Turf….is now part of the page. Coming in at #179 of 182 movies….but at least it is now on the page. Thank you.

  4. As I was reading your analysis on the “average movie price” of a 1939 movie. I have done plenty of research myself, and though each movie has their own “Average Price”… Like Gone With the Wind” was 82c for the first release, the average for the top 30 otherwise ranged from 27 to 29c a ticket, so I agree with your assessment. 23c is way too low for the top movies, as an average.

    Reply

    1. Hey Chris, from 1985 to today, Box Office Mojo, is the most reliable source out there. When it comes to earlier movies their numbers leave a lot to be desired. This yearly review was the second one we did….the ticket part you read needs to be updated, as the current average ticket is now greater. Thanks for the feedback.

      Reply

  5. Hey Joan….on this page…Torchy Blane.. Playing With Dynamite (1939) is only showing it’s domestic box office total of $5.20 million. In the 1930-1939 Worldwide Page….Torchy Blane.. Playing With Dynamite (1939) made the list because we also have worldwide grosses for that movie….so it’s $7.74 million made the list.

    Numerous readers asked for a page that only focused on worldwide grosses…..the 1930-1939 worldwide gross was in response to that….but it is not a “be all” just the ones that we have domestic and international box office rentals on….I will go back and make that distinction more clear on that page. Thanks for letting us know that the page is pretty confusing.

    * Tried to clarify the table at the bottom of the massive amount of movies….found on the 1930-1939 Worldwide Table Page.

    Reply

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