1959 Top Grossing Movies

Finding box office information for movies made before 1980 is not an easy task.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1959 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 30,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1959 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1959.  This page will looks at 123 1959 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 informationSo why 1959?  There are a couple of reasons….(1) Headed to Alabama for the rest of the holiday and (2) this year gives Steve Lensman’s favorite movie….Ben-Hur….lots of respect.

Our UMR Top 50 of 1959

1959 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 1959 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1959 Top Grossing Movies by stars of the movie
  • Sort 1959 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1959 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 each 1959 Top Grossing Movies received and how many Oscar® wins each 1959 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1959 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.

1959 Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

 Top earners in 1959 for Adjusted USA Box Office:

My Main Sources

Source 1: Variety – January 4th, 1961 Page 47

Source 2: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon

Source 3:  Wikipedia

Source 4:  IMDb.com

Source 5:  BoxOfficeMojo.com


How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1959….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.  Every year the rental to box office gross percentage changed…in 1959 this meant you had to triple the rentals to get the gross….so the multiplier used in this page was 3.0.

My Yearly Review Pages

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

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53 thoughts on “1959 Top Grossing Movies

  1. On this page the SURNAME of the leading man requires entry. Only Christian name included.

    The man is Jeff Chandler and the movie is faithfully credited to Jeff on his own Cogerson page.

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