1942 Top Grossing Movies

Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in the biggest box office hit of 1942...Mrs. Miniver
Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon in the biggest box office hit of 1942…Mrs. Miniver

This movie page looks at 145 1942 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 1942 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 23,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1942 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1942.  Obviously many movies (How Green Was My Valley and Ball of Fire) made in 1941 earned box office dollars in 1942.  On the other side many movies made in 1942 made money in 1943 and later.  This page will looks at 168 1942 Top Grossing 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.

And now for the part of the movie page that the wife calls the “drivel” part of our movie pages.  When we decided to do a page on 1942 box office grosses….the thought was this was going to be an easy and fast page to write…well 3 days later and we are finally finishing off the page.  Guess the fact that we have collected so many sources of box office information is a good but very time consuming thing. Talk about confusing….Casablanca is listed by IMDb as a 1942 movie.  Casablanca was not eligible for the Oscars® for movies made in 1942…but did qualify for the Oscars® for movies made in 1943…..so that is why we have two Best Picture Oscar® winners on one page.

Gary Cooper in 1942's The Pride of the Yankees
Gary Cooper in 1942’s The Pride of the Yankees

Our UMR Top 50 of 1942

1942 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 1942 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing 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 1942 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1942 Top Grossing 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.
James Cagney in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy
James Cagney in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy

 

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 – 1941,1942,1947,1954,1961,1968,1971,1974

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

How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1942….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.  We 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:  Lets look at Errol Flynn’s Desperate Journey. Desperate Journey returned to RKO studies $2,029,000 million in box office rentals.  Using my multiplier of 2.2….I calculate that the box office gross was $4,463,000 million in 1942. 

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 1942 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 1942. 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 Desperate Journey was released this year it would earn about $125.00 million.  Desperate Journey’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 Desperate Journey’s adjusted box office total of $125.00 million…it would rank as the 23rd highest grossing movie of 2014….one spot ahead of Lucy.

Not Enough Stats?  How About A 1942 Adjusted Worldwide Box Office Table?

1942 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

Jump to Domestic Box Office

My Yearly Review Pages

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.

If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.

(Visited 11,198 times)

29 thoughts on “1942 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. Once again, a great job. It’s a very good idea to make yearly top grossing. I saw only 20 movies but my favorites is Mrs Miniver. This movie was a big success with over 10 millions admissions ($3 millions). It stay the 61° biggest success of all-time in Great Britain. In France it was a success too with almost 4 millions admissions ($1.15millions).

    Reply

    1. Hey laurent…..thanks for the comment and the compliment. Mrs. Miniver is one of the highest ranked movies in my entire database…..so your favorite is very well thought of. It is not often that a movie like Mrs. Miniver was so important to a country….I love how Churchill thought Mrs. Miniver was vital in winning the war. Thanks for the stats in France and England.

      Reply

  2. An epic movie page Bruce, well done! 1942 isn’t one of my favorite movie years I’ve seen just 39 of the 145 films you’ve listed. My favorite movies? Yankee Doodle Dandy, Road to Morocco, Bambi and of course Casablanca… oh wait a sec where is Casablanca? Oh lordy lord it ain’t there.
    I know it won Best Picture in 1944 but it did receive a New York premiere in 1942. Mrs Miniver won Best Picture at the 1943 ceremony, confusing isn’t it? 🙂
    I still haven’t seen Mrs. Miniver or Pride of the Yankees, but they are on my to see list. Half a billion dollars in adjusted grosses for Mrs. Miniver is rather a lot isn’t it. I can’t imagine millions of people queuing up to see that one. I know Bambi was a huge hit, adjusted is $534m for just the North American grosses! So Bambi should be about a billion gross worldwide? 🙂

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve.
      1. Thanks for reading, commenting and visiting my latest page.
      2. My tally count is 29….maybe 30…as I think I have seen the John Wayne movie In Old California….but I am not 100% sure.
      3. Casablanca is confusing….but if I had included it on this page…then I think things would have gotten even more confusing…with two pictures earning Best Picture Oscars.
      4. I only listed Bambi’s 1942 box office here…..but yes Bambi is over $517 million in North America and almost $500 million in worldwide box office…..in adjusted box office grosses and looking at all of the re-releases.
      5. I thought Mrs. Miniver was one of England’s favorite movies….Winston Churchill once said that this film had done more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers.
      6. Mrs. Miniver was the 18th biggest hit of the 1940s….the 1940s was the greatest decade of movie admissions ever….so yes people were lined up to see that movie.
      7. As always….you are the man.

      Reply

  3. Hello Bruce. I am glad to see you’ve done another year of classic films. 1942 was a good year for films and I’ve seen many of them. You missed putting “All Through the Night” on this impressive List. But you have listed on your very good Humphrey Bogart page at $2.22m. I was very happy to see that you had “This Gun for Hire” listed here. I was always curious as to how much this had done. Do you have any box office info on Alan Ladd’s other film noir classic of 1942 “The Glass Key”. I was also wondering if you had any information on the 1965 film “King Rat” starring George Segal in an early star turn. Thanks for anther Yearly Film Box Office page.

    Reply

    1. Hey Lyle…..All Through The Night has a IMDb 1941 year listed…..so I went back to my Bogart page and corrected it to 1941….good catch I am impressed. I was surprised that This Gun For Hire did not do better at the box office….many times when a movie becomes a classic the assumption is the movie did great at the box office…..I am sure in 50 years somebody will be shocked to see that Shawshank Redemption struggled at the box office.
      As for the Glass Key…..I have admissions in France via Wiki which does not help….while my The Paramount Story book says “but it became a box-office howitzer because of the immediate popularity of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake”….hard to give a number value to a “howitzer:.it did not make Variety’s Golden 1,000,000 Club.
      King Rat was the number one movie in North America from Nov.7th through Nov. 21st earning $5.69 million during those three weeks. It is not listed on Variety’s Top Grossers of 1965 or 1966….nor did it make any of the Variety 4 million rentals collections….so an educated guess using the ceiling (4.0 million in rentals) and the floor (2.60 million in rentals for a gross of $5.69 million) would be $3.20 million in rentals, $7.04 million in adjusted gross or about $56.90 million in adjusted gross.
      Glad you liked the page….I hope to do more of these pages in the near future.

      Reply

  4. Hi
    It was certainly big box office, a great year for Greer Garson, Bing Crosby, James Cagney and Bob Hope. To be honest I’ve never heard of a lot of the movies you mentioned, but I’ve seen all the big ones. I particularly like The Palm Beach Story and I Married a Witch. I always get confused about Casablanca, some commentators say 42 and others say 43. I suppose its a great movie, no matter what year.
    The fact that over 50 movies grossed over 100 million was the norm at that time, how much would today’s producers love to be in the same position.

    Reply

    1. Hey Chris…..I agree with you…as there are lots of movies on this list that time has forgotten. I think even a huge Henry Fonda would have to name 40 or 50 movies before they got to The Male Animal. I liked I Married A Witch too….I want to see The Palm Beach Story….especially since one of these days I will be doing a Claudette Colbert page.
      Casablanca is very confusing when it comes to release date. IMDb list Casablanca as 1942….but it won the Oscar for Best Picture for the movies released in 1943. So Casablanca should be on the list…..but one day I will do a 1943 page….and I want to include Casablanca on that one since it won the big prize. Not sure how it was eligible for the 1943 Oscars and not the 1942 Oscars….as you say….CONFUSING! I will go back and address that issue in the page in the “drivel” section.
      Looking at the last few years…2013 saw 35 movies reach $100 million….while 2014 saw 33 movies reach $100 million….so far 19 have made it in 2015…..so yes I am sure the producers want to see those glory days to return. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

      Reply

  5. Have to admit I am not aware of many of these movies; but you seem to have put together an excellent reference. Impressive!

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.