1937 Top Box Office Movies

Myrna Loy’s two 1937 movies grossed almost $300 million in adjusted box office

This movie page looks at 1937 Top Box Office Movies.  Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1937 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 33,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1937 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1937.  Obviously many movies made in 1936 earned box office dollars in 1937.  On the other side many movies made in 1937 made money in 1938 and later.  This page will looks at 132 1937 Top Box Office Movies.  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.

The following massive table only includes the movies made in 1937 that are in our database.  Since we are constantly adding new movies to our database….this page will quickly become obsolete.  We will try and update this page on a regular basis.

Snow White is the top grossing movie of 1937…but….it took many re-releases over many decades to end up with close to a billion in adjusted domestic gross

Our UMR Top 50 of 1937

1937 Top 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 1937 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.  If you want to see the 3 Paul Muni movies on the table…just type in his name in the search box and up they will come
  • Sort 1937 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1937 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1937 Top Box Office 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 1937 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1937 Top Box Office Movies by Ultimate Movie Ranking Score (UMR).  Our UMR score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: Variety Magazine – January 6th 1943

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions

Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1942 by Tino Balio

Source 6: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon

Source 7:  Wikipedia

Source 8:  IMDb.com

Source 9:  “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy

Source 10: Hollywood Power Stats by Christopher Reynolds

1937 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

Our Yearly Review Pages

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.
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52 thoughts on “1937 Top Box Office Movies”

  1. DOUBLE WEDDING [1937]
    From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
    Production
    Double Wedding had the working title of “Three’s Company”. Originally, Robert Young and Robert Benchley were to have roles in the film which was the seventh pairing of Powell and Loy. Loy’s previous film, Parnell (1937) did not do well at the box office, so MGM paired her with Powell again to rehabilitate her career.

    Reply

    1. See my previous comment…but my final point…would be by the late 1930s….lots of stars were labeled “box office poison”….I have never read that Loy was considered that. Good discussion as usual.

      Reply

  2. The lead-in to this page whilst statistically accurate is totally misleading in spirit as it suggests a success story for Myrna Loy in particular whereas Clark Gable and William Powell were the top-billed stars of the two films concerned Parnell and Double Wedding Moreover Parnell was a box office disaster and one of the few Gable films to lose money and Wikipedia records that it reflected so unfavourably on Loy as Clark’s co-star that MGM put her into Double Wedding with Powell so that “IT WOULD REHABILITATE HER CAREER ” Loy had originally been scheduled to do the Last of Mrs Cheyney but Joan Crawford wanted that part so Loy was cast in Parnell while a top-billed Crawford with Bill Powell as 2nd lead carried that movie to a huge profit for MGM

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….I can live with “statistically accurate”. Despite the awfulness of Parnell…it still almost reached a million in rentals….so the fans of Loy and Gable supported the movie to a box office ranking of 46th. As for Double Wedding an even bigger hit…..the Powell/Loy screen team was the most popular at the time….so not sure her career needed to be saved…especially during this time her popularity was double that of Crawford and Davis combined.

      Comparing The Last of Mrs. Cheyney to Double Wedding profitability….Double Wedding earned $2,041,000 in worldwide rentals to $1,797,000 in worldwide rentals for Cheyney. Then when you look at the profits….Cheyney had a return over 50% which is stellar….but way behind the 101% profitability of Double Wedding. I imagine the producers of Cheyney had wished they had kept Loy over Crawford.

      Thanks for the feedback.

      Reply

  3. Hi Bruce
    I love these annual table. And I am happy at this moment given the pace of publication.

    In France, we have the official box office figures since 1944. But for before, it’s almost impossible to have anything. Officially the biggest success of all time is Titanic with over 21 million admissions. At least since 1944. For a long time it was believed that no film of the thirties had been sufficient success to beat this record.
    But about 5 years ago the National Cinematographic Center dusted off its archives. And they noticed with surprise that Snow White had made 18.3 million since 1944 by reissues. That is about 3 million less than Titanic. The question that one can then ask, is when it first exploited in 1938 was it successful enough to overtake Titanic?

    It is in any case very possible. By digging through period papers, I could have some clues. For example, in French Cinematography (the French Variety of the time), it was ranked as the biggest success of 1938. But without giving any figures, unfortunately. But an advertisement of the time, published in this same magazine, spoke of a million entries in Paris alone ! A big score, even for today. Moreover, statistically, on average a film makes about 1/5 of its entries in Paris. Finally, in spite of the war and the Nazi occupation which forbade the broadcasting of Allied films, it had the right to be broadcast again after 1940. It remained in the French cinemas from 1938 to 1942. Also, considering all these elements I thinks that Snow White is probably the biggest success of all time at the French box office.
    I only saw 7 movies of this list, but saw other films of that year, like la Grande Illusion by Jean Renoir, with Jean Gabin for example.

    Reply

    1. Hey Laurent….glad you like these pages. I wish America had “official box office figures” from 1944. Interesting question about Snow White versus Titanic. I would give the edge to Snow White. Thanks for sharing some of the results of your research. Good to know that France has it’s equivalent Variety. Grande Illusion is considered one of the greatest movies of all-time….I have also seen it…though my copy was pretty weak…I would love to see that one on a remastered blu-ray. Thanks for the comment and the visit.

      Reply

  4. Just saw Dan’s list of films seen, whoa dude that’s enormous amount of films. I doubt even Leonard Maltin has seen that many. How do you find the time?

    Btw you seem to have avoided the film of the year – Snow White.

    Hey Bruce, be scared, be very scared but um ‘Nothing Scared’… is still in your database… 🙂

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve…..yep….Dan’s list is pretty impressive. I imagine Maltin and Dan would have a good competition to see who watched more movies.

      As for Snow White….he commented somewhere else that he had stayed away from some of the Disney animated classics.

      Nothing Scared…Nothing Sacred…..what’s the difference between friends…..of “ca” or “ac”….lol. Actually fixed it on this page….now I need to look at Lombard and March’s page….plus fix it on in my database.

      Thanks for the return comment.

      Reply

    2. Have never seen Snow White, saw parts of it in old Disney shows where they show scenes from some of their films that fit the topic they’re doing. We’re talking when Walt was hosting and maybe the years after into the 70’s. As of the end of last year I had seen 22064 films not counting shows, serials or made for TV films. For a yearly breakdown at least since 2003;

      2003 – 439
      2004 – 422
      2005 – 380
      2006 – 396
      2007 – 417
      2008 – 422
      2009 – 489
      2010 – 633
      2011 – 691
      2012 – 721
      2013 – 680
      2014 – 654
      2015 – 613
      2016 – 764

      B western which run about an hour are easy. See over 200 or so current films every year. Big jumps in years can be attributed to when certain cable channels were added to our cable plan. Last year we got all the Showtime, Starz and EPIX channels.

      Reply

  5. Hey the comment box is back, woohoo! 🙂

    1937 eh? Was it a good year? For me personally… nope. I’ve seen just…. 27 of the 132 films listed here. The first ever full length animated film – Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs – easily my favorite movie from this year and my most watched, you can bin the rest (stop it Steve!)

    1937 was a bad year for horror and science fiction but it did contain a couple of noteworthy (live-action) fantasy movies – Topper (Cary Grant as a ghost! How often does that happen in the movies?) and Lost Horizon (an expensive flop for Frank Capra).

    I’ve seen 7 from your critics top 10 and 7 from the UMR top 10.

    Looking at my movie database, I find 41 films from 1937, I haven’t watched all of them –

    Ali Baba Goes to Town
    Awful Truth ,The
    Black Legion
    Broadway Melody of 1938
    Bulldog Drummond Escapes
    Captains Courageous
    Charlie Chan at Monte Carlo
    Charlie Chan at the Olympics
    Charlie Chan on Broadway
    Damsel in Distress ,A
    Day at the Races ,A (Marx Bros Coll)
    Dead End
    Good Earth ,The
    Hell Town
    Hollywood Hotel
    Hurricane ,The
    Kid Galahad
    King Solomon’s Mines
    Knight Without Armour
    Last Gangster ,The
    Life of Emile Zola ,The
    Lost Horizon
    Man Who Could Work Miracles ,The
    Night Key
    Nothing Sacred
    Prince and the Pauper ,The
    Prisoner of Zenda ,The
    San Quentin
    Shall We Dance
    Snow White and the 7 Dwarfs (3-disc Diamond Edition)
    Souls at Sea
    Stage Door
    Star is Born ,A
    Thank You Mr. Moto
    Think Fast Mr. Moto
    Toast of New York ,The
    Topper
    Varsity Show
    Way Out West
    You Only Live Once
    Young and Innocent

    Excellent work finding stats on all the films Bruce, where else on the net can you see all this info on this one particular year? Voted Up!

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve….yep…the comment box is up and running again. Wow….I had not responded to almost none of these comments….bad Cogerson! I have to admit….these are only the movies that I have researched for other pages…..being in a time crunch….I have had to decide to release the ones I have without doing more research on 1937 movies. I am sure I could add in another 40 or so movies if I included all the ones I have box office on. Then I think I would pick most of the ones you listed here.

      You and Dan…have equally impressive data collecting files. Truly impressive. Glad this page gives you a place to share this information. I just recently watched Lost Horizon….a good movie…but ignored back then…..too bad it was not in color. Topper is the first movie that was a hit for Grant when he was the star….and after that he never looked back.

      Thanks as always for the visit and the comment.

      Reply

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