1944 Top Grossing Movies

This movie page looks at 1944 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 1944 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 1944 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1944.  Obviously many movies made in 1943 earned box office dollars in 1944.  On the other side many movies made in 1944 made money in 1945 and later.  This page will looks at 128 1944 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 1944 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.

Our UMR Top 50 of 1944

1950 Top Box Office Movies Can Be Ranked 7 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort 1944 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1944 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1944 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions).
  • Sort 1944 Top Box Office Movies by yearly domestic box office rank
  • Sort 1944 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 1944 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1944 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.
James Cagney in 1942's Yankee Doodle Dandy
James Cagney in 1942’s Yankee Doodle Dandy

 

How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1944….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?

1944 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

Jump to Domestic Box Office

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

 

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.
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59 thoughts on “1944 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. Hey Steve….Thanks for the mini-review of Meet Me in St. Louis….it looks like I will have to watch it in my bedroom….as that is the only DVD player that likes the copy I currently have…..which means the chances I watch it are pretty slim.

    I love Casablanca….one of my all-time favorites. It will be making on my delayed Favorite Movies of All-Time page that is coming sometime in the future.

    Well….a BYOOL trailer is a start…..one day. Skip the singing priest…though Going My Way is another Best Picture Oscar winner that you have avoided.

    Thanks for the re-visit.

    Reply

  3. Hello Steve Lensman.
    The Greatest Mass Murderer of this century is Chairman Mao Zedong who murdered over two hundred million of his own people. Joseph Stalin comes in second with Adolph Hitler in third place.

    Reply

    2. Thanks for the correction Lyle, Chairman Mao and Stalin were busy fellows and not very nice were they? But wait… they didn’t start a world war, so that makes them slackers in my book. 🙂

      Reply

      1. Hey Steve….Hitler took all of their press when he tried to take over the world versus the small goals of Stalin and Mao who only wanted to rule their countries with an iron fist. I guess they are guilty of not thinking “big”. Lol.

        Reply

  4. Hello Bruce.
    1944 is one of my favorite years for films. Thanks for this page. And 1938,1940,1942, 1943, 1946 and all the other years you’ve cover in film. As for Dragon Seed (1944), according to MGM it made $3,033,000 in domestic rentals and $4,627,000 in worldwide rentals. You must have missed a digit. Thanks again for this page.

    Reply

    1. Hey Lyle….hopefully….in the next few weeks….I will have a page from 1935 to 1949….that is the plan. Hmmm…..you are 100% correct about Dragon Seed….my number was way way off. That will ONLY move Dragon Seed from 93rd to 13th…..that is only 80 spots. Huge error on my part…..looking at my database….it looks like I got my number from a Hepburn book….I think the MGM ledgers are a much better source. Thanks for the heads up there. I will fix it here….and then on my Great Kate page and my Lionel Barrymore page. Thanks again.

      Reply

  5. Another War Year. The year of the D-Day Invasion and the beginning of the end for Adolf Hitler, the greatest mass murderer in history? There would not have been a second world war if Hitler didn’t exist, not in the 20th century at least.

    Hollywood was still churning them out… a better year than 1943 IMO but I watched less movies from 1944, just 25 out of the 103 listed on this chart.

    Favorites include – It’s a Wonderful Life, Laura, Henry V, Three Caballeros, Lifeboat, To Have and Have Not, Passage to Marseilles, Half a Minute over Tokyo, Meet me in St. Louis, The Pirate and the Princess, Murder My Sweet (aka Farewell My Lovely) and Double Indemnity.

    Femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck in a blonde wig tops the critics and UMR charts, no real problem with that though I enjoyed some of the others more.

    Going My Way tops the box office chart, a huge hit, never saw it. I was expecting Judy Judy Judy in Meet Me in St. Louis-Louis to be a bigger box office attraction than Bing Crosby as a singing priest, I was wrong.

    Looking at the datafiles for my movie collection I have 50 films from the year 1944, a bunch of them are not on Bruce’s chart. I’ve seen 35 from this list, maybe more.

    Adventures of Mark Twain ,The
    Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves
    Arsenic and Old Lace
    Bathing Beauty
    Belle of the Yukon
    Buffalo Bill
    Canterville Ghost ,The
    Climax ,The
    Cobra Woman
    Cover Girl
    Curse of the Cat People
    Double Indemnity
    Falcon in Hollywood ,The
    Farewell My Lovely
    Fighting Seabees ,The
    Fighting Sullivans ,The
    Gaslight
    Ghost Catchers
    Going My Way
    Hail the Conquering Hero
    Henry V
    Hollywood Canteen
    House of Frankenstein (Legacy Box Set)
    Invisible Man’s Revenge ,The (Legacy Box set)
    Lady in the Dark
    Laura
    Lifeboat (steelcase + booklet)
    Lodger ,The
    Mask of Dimitrios ,The
    Meet Me in St.Louis (2-disc special edition)
    Ministry of Fear
    Miracle of Morgan’s Creek ,The
    Mummy’s Curse ,The (Legacy Box Set)
    Mummy’s Ghost ,The (Legacy Box set)
    National Velvet
    Passage to Marseilles
    Princess and the Pirate ,The
    Sherlock Holmes – The House of Fear
    Sherlock Holmes – The Pearl of Death
    Sherlock Holmes – The Scarlet Claw
    Sherlock Holmes – The Spider Woman
    Step Lively
    Tall in the Saddle
    Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo
    This Happy Breed
    Three Caballeros ,The
    To Have and Have Not
    Uncertain Glory
    Uninvited ,The
    Way Ahead ,The

    Another top movie page Bruce, keep em coming. Voted Up!

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve
      1. Thanks for checking out our latest “yearly page”…closing the gap….if (I should say when) I do a 1945 page…I will have a yearly page from 1937 to 1946.
      2. Tally count: Dan 161 (Total all 1944 movies), Lupino 51, Flora 40, Steve 25, Pierre 20 and me sitting in last place at 17.
      3. Neither one of us….medaled….I remembered the days when I at least got a bronze…then again…it was only you, me and Flora playing…lol.
      4. With my schedule getting too tight….I have had to take the short cut of just listing the movies that were completely done in my database….I have 138 movies for 1944…..just 35 have not been researched 100%…..looking at your list….I have more than a few of those in the database.
      5. I imagine….I will have to keep going back and updating these pages….because….”new” “old” movies are being added all the time.
      6. Of the favorites you list….I have seen and enjoyed most of them. Though I usually include It’s A Wonderful Life when I am talking about 1946 movies…..lol. The only two I have not see are Passage to Marseilles and Meet me in St. Louis.
      7. Meet Me In St. Louis…is currently in my house. I started watching it last night….but did not finish….I brought it downstairs to watch tonight…but apparently the blu-ray downstairs does not like the movie and refuses to play it.
      Thanks for the kind words, the comment, the visit and the tally count.

      Reply

      1. Hi Bruce, so is Meet Me in St. Louis the most famous movie you’ve never watched then? I can’t stand the kids in that movie but I love Judy Judy Judy! Have you seen Casablanca? My favorite B/W movie of the 1940s?

        I nearly watched the trailer to The Best Years of Our Lives a few days ago, that’s as close I’ve got to that WWII drama. I’ve also never watched Bing Crosby as a singing priest, he boasted proudly.

        Reply

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