Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) is now the number one movie when it comes to North America box office grosses. The box office success of Star Wars 7 was incredible. But, when you look at the all-time North America ticket sales leaders…..Star Wars: The Force Awakens has not even cracked the Top 10.
So with Star Wars: The Force Awakens now being listed as the biggest box office hit of all-time….we figured it would be interesting to look at the top ticket selling movies of all-time. The following table shows all the movies in our database that sold more than 40 million tickets in North America. If you compare our table to Box Office Mojo’s Adjusted For Inflation Leaders you will see some differences. Box Office Mojo is awesome when looking at movies from 1982 to today. Easily the best source on the internet. Movies made before 1980 are not the strength of Box Office Mojo…as they often use box office rentals versus box office grosses.
We did some massive updates on this page today. The good news is we now have more information on each of these blockbusters. The bad news is our database is not letting us include our estimated ticket sells in the table….so we had to create a second table with those ticket numbers. So if you sort the first table by adjusted domestic gross….it will rank the top box office movies from #1 Gone With The Wind to #275 The Aristocats. To see the estimated ticket sell numbers you have to go to the second table.
All Time Top Ticket Selling Movies Can Be Sorted 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 All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by movie title and movie trailers
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by the stars of the movie
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by how much they earned in adjusted domestic box office (in millions)
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by estimated tickets sold (in millions)
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by critic and audience reviews
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movies by Oscar nominations and Oscar wins
- Sort All Time Top Ticket Selling movie by UMR Score…..UMR Score combines box office, reviews and awards
BOB to STEVE Part 3
January 6, 2020 at 3:47 pm
MY PICK OF THE 19 BEST ENTRIES: STILLS
1/Lawrence
2/Close Encounters
3/Dark Knight Rises
4/Lobby card for White Christmas
5/Lion King
6/Newman/McQueen/Dunaway relaxing on set
7/Lord of the Rings 03
8/Pirates of the Caribbean 2006
9/Samson & Delilah
10/Goldfinger
11/ET
12/Independence Day
13/Jurassic Park
14/Chuck in chariot
15/Empire Strikes Back
16/Avatar
17/Jaws
18/”Behold the power of the Lord!”
19/Cleopatra
BIGGEST SURPRISE: After all the fuss and ballyhoo Dire Hard didn’t make the cut. Christmas will never be the same again!
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BOB to STEVE Part 2
January 6, 2020 at 3:39 pm
HI STEVE: Great to hear from you again and I hope the NY goes smoothly for you. I for one am quite happy with your ‘Extended Play’ video.
MY PICK OF THE 20 BEST ENTRIES:POSTERS
1/Foreign language one for Bridge on River Kawi
2/Poseidon Adventure
3/Lawrence
4/The Kid
5/6th Sense
6/Spiderman 2
7/2nd one for Batman 1989
8/Ben Hur 1925
9/Two for Samson and Delilah
10/foreign language one for Cleopatra
11/2nd one for Butch Cassidy
12/Big Parade
13/Birth of a Nation
14/Black Panther
15/foreign language one for Mary Poppins
16/This is the Army
17/entire set for Gone with the Wind
18/Two for Dark Knight 2008
19/Entire set for Star Wars 1977
20/Most of the other Star Wars movies.
NOTES 1/For Bridge on River Kwai Golden Holden got top billing on all posters and on screen. However the two Brits Hawkins and Guinness seem to have agreed to share the 2nd spot on the posters with Jack coming 2nd on some of them and Alec in 2nd place on others. Currently IMDB has a Guinness/Hawkins poster whereas Wikipedia has the Hawkins/Guinness version which is favoured by you.
2/Overall in your video many of the posters for even some of the most famous films are unique in my experience. Well done.
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Steve Lensman
January 6, 2020 at 3:32 pm
Happy New Year Bob! This new video was an experiment to see if my style of video can sustain a longer format. Bruce’s stats came in useful. Though like you say they are estimates, a rough impression of what the most watched movies looked like and where they stand.
My next video will also be lengthy and will be uploaded next monday. A mixture of sources this time including my calculations.
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BOB to STEVE – Ticket Sales Video
January 6, 2020 at 12:42 pm
So you think you are good enough to beat The Work Horse at his own game, do you? You fairly sneaked that one in and just as HE was boasting about giving us material without stats.
Still it was a nice way to start off the New Year, a pictorial and statistical run down of the 100 most popular films of all time. I will in Parts 2 and 3 comment on just the merits as I perceive them of the posters and stills and will avoid any judgement as to whether I think any of the movies concerned deserved to be a big ticket seller.
I should add that box office statistical historians and indeed Box Office Mojo caution that whilst ticket sales are the best way of measuring a movie’s popularity, multiplying a movie’s ticket sales in past years by the average price of a ticket today is not in itself, for numerous reasons, a completely foolproff way of determining every film’s inflation adjusted gross, though that is the practice employed by many inflation adjusting sites and agencies. Here are a few of the drawbacks.
1/Many films can draw large children’s audiences for whom tickets are cheaper than they are for adult audiences and therefore below the average ticket price.
2/Some films are able to charge especially high prices on initial release – Godpop 1972 is one example – and therefore those tickets are priced above the average.
3/I note your figures reflect just domestic ticket sales; and indeed most if not all tables ranking the supposedly most popular films exclude foreign sales. The latter could make a great difference to the rankings. For example (1) domestic grosses for Bond films have traditionally been just one third of the worldwide earnings of those movies (2) Chuck’s 10 Commandments attracted 262 million worldwide ticket sales.
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BOB to STEVE – Ticket Sales Video
January 6, 2020 at 12:42 pm
So you think you are good enough to beat The Work Horse at his own game, do you? You fairly sneaked that one in and just as HE was boasting about giving us material without stats.
Still it was a nice way to start off the New Year, a pictorial and statistical run down of the 100 most popular films of all time. I will in Parts 2 and 3 comment on just the merits as I perceive them of the posters and stills and will avoid any judgement as to whether I think any of the movies concerned deserved to be a big ticket seller.
I should add that box office statistical historians and indeed Box Office Mojo caution that whilst ticket sales are the best way of measuring a movie’s popularity, multiplying a movie’s ticket sales in past years by the average price of a ticket today is not in itself, for numerous reasons, a completely foolproff way of determining every film’s inflation adjusted gross, though that is the practice employed by many inflation adjusting sites and agencies. Here are a few of the drawbacks.
1/Many films can draw large children’s audiences for whom tickets are cheaper than they are for adult audiences and therefore below the average ticket price.
2/Some films are able to charge especially high prices on initial release – Godpop 1972 is one example – and therefore those tickets are priced above the average.
3/I note your figures reflect just domestic ticket sales; and indeed most if not all tables ranking the supposedly most popular films exclude foreign sales. The latter could make a great difference to the rankings. For example (1) domestic grosses for Bond films have traditionally been just one third of the worldwide earnings of those movies (2) Chuck’s 10 Commandments attracted 262 million worldwide ticket sales.
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