1940 Top Grossing Movies

boom 2222This movie page looks at 1940 Top Grossing Movies.  Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1940 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 26,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1940 movies in our database.

So we are currently working on a massive movie western page that is taking lots of our time.  So while we are working on that page that is looking at 100s and 100s of movies…we felt we should get some new material out on our website.  So if you consider information on movies that are over 75 years new….then here you go.  The following table is very very basic.  We pretty much copied and pasted right out of our database. 

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Our UMR Top 50 of 1940

1940 Top Grossing 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 1940 Top Grossing Movies by stars of the movies
  • Sort 1940 Top Grossing Movies by domestic actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1940 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1940 Top Grossing Movies by 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 1940 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1940 Movies movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.

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27 thoughts on “1940 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. Hi. Can you tell me how you arrived at the $1,900,000 gross for “The Long Voyage Home” ? Other sources (Wayne and Ford bios, etc.) indicate the gross to be just $580,000 against a cost of $683,000—a money dud and a long way from 1.9 mil. What’s your take on this? Cheers,Mark

    Reply

  2. Question about STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR: you list the DBO as $1.1M while IMDb has a trivia item saying the movie lost $56,000 from RKO. With an estimated budget of $171,200, that puts the box office around $115,200. Any idea where the discrepancy comes from?

    We’re doing a podcast Jan 3 about this film for Decades of Horror: The Classic Era as what we call “horror-adjacent noir.” Any info you can provide will be appreciated.

    Love the website!! Use it and reference it frequently!
    Jeff

    Reply

    1. Hey Jeff. First of all, we are glad you use UMR as a reference. As for Stranger on the Third Floor. We have the box office rental number at $382,000. That would translate to just over a million in box office gross. Our RKO ledger files do not actually list the movie. In cases like that we use the Harrison Reports to help get a box office rental number. Our database has 1000s of the Harrison Reports’ adjectives to estimate a box office number. In this case the 1940 Harrison Report lists Stranger on the Third Floor as “fair to poor”. So we look at all the movies that earned that “fair to poor” rating with known numbers from our “Ledger” research from 1939 to 1942 and see what those grosses equaled.

      Is it a perfect way to do it? Of course, not…..but….we here at UMR have always said these “grosses” are our best guesses. Another great source we use for RKO movies is The RKO Story by Ricard Jewll and Vernon Harbin. They wrote that Stranger On The Third Floor was one of the better B movies of that year. So putting all of these facts together….I feel good about our estimated gross. I love IMDb….but when it comes to classic movies there information is not always the best. I hope that helps. I

      Reply

      1. Thank you!! IMDb is always iffy. For example, a Hammer film we did listed Toho as a co-production company. I asked my friend Richard Klemensen, owner/editor/publisher of “Little Shoppe of Horrors: The Journal of Classic British Horror Films” and he laughed about a possible Toho connection. I sent in a correction request to IMDb and they did remove Toho from the details.

        Thanks again! We really appreciate your help with our research! That particular episode is scheduled for publication Jan 14.
        jeff

        Reply

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