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 information.  So 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.

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53 thoughts on “1959 Top Grossing Movies”

  1. I am incredibly impressed with your ground-breaking research on thousands of Hollywood films, as well as film stars.
    I was reviewing your 1959 page, but I did not find the film A Summer Place. Although, the film was long before my time, the film is legendary and was a big box-office hit.
    Thank you for your time and congrats on your awesome work.

    Reply

      1. Hey Frank. (1) Thanks for the nice words about our website. (2) As for A Summer Place…..it was one of the few movies that slipped through the Variety year end reports….as it did not make either their 1959 or 1960 top grossers. (3) At the time I wrote this page….I did not have any Warner Brothers box office ledger information. (4) Last year I made the trip to USC to see the ledgers with my very own eyes. (5) So now we were able to include A Summer Place in the table. (6) It is not listed in this table…but it also earned another $99 million in worldwide adjusted gross….for a worldwide total of about $275 million. (7) The previous comment was actually from WoC (Wife of Cogerson)….and she is the one that saw your comment, added the movie and updated the page. (8) Thanks for letting us know that we were missing a movie.

        Reply

  2. Hey Cogerson, thanks for the explanations and additional info! So you have other sources besides Variety, which is probably very wise. I thought this was the case but was not sure. Although I’m a Garner fan, I actually didn’t like Up Periscope that much and think it did relatively well at the box office mainly thanks to Garner’s rising popularity on Maverick. Some my favorites from 1959 are Anatomy of a Murder, On the Beach, Compulsion, The Mouse that Roared and of course Ben-Hur, Some Like it Hot and North by Northwest. Some films that did not do as well as these at the box office (at least in the (US) but that I would recommend include the British classic, I’m All Right Jack – a great satire of British society of the time, the business world and labor relations, with at least 2 wonderful comedians (Peter Sellers and Terry Thomas); Warlock, a thoughtful and entertaining western with Richard Widmark unusually taking on a more sympathetic role than Henry Fonda; The Devil’s Disciple, with Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas reuniting for the 3rd time, playing different types of American revolutionaries fighting off an inept British army commanded by Laurence Olivier – based on a play by George Bernard Shaw, an interesting perspective of the times, works so-so on the screen, but with these 3 legendary stars, who can complain? And speaking of the Devil, maybe Shake Hands with the Devil, with American student Don Murray idealistically joining the Irish nationalist cause in the 1920s but then having to chose between his humanity and the violence of ruthless IRA gunman James Cagney – with Richard Harris notable in one of his firs significant roles. All in all, a great year for movies!

    Reply

    1. Hey Phil Simmons. Yep over the years my sources have greatly improved. I remember my first sources were lots of biographies and auto biographies…but they rarely mentioned box office grosses. I have not seen Up Periscope but I want to…I like Garner’s other movies made during that time period.

      As for 1959….a very good year for movies. 3 all-time classics in Ben-Hur, North by Northwest and Some Like It Hot. I’m All Right, Jack is on my list of movies to watch. I have seen and enjoyed Warlock…an underrated western. Devil’s Disciple is also on my list of movies to watch…three all-time greats in that movie.

      Cagney’s Shake Hands With The Devil…is rarely mentioned when 1959 comes up…..I will have to see if I can track that one down too. Good feedback.

      Reply

  3. Interesting table. Never Steal anything Small & No Name on the Bullet were released on the same double bill over here in Belfast but whilst the Cagney movie made less money stateside albeit marginally than the Audie Murphy one the latter was placed as the supporting feature on our double bill.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….I barely remember putting this one together….I guess that is the problem with having over 500 internet movie page children…you can not give them all the proper attention they deserve…lol. That sounds like a good double bill….a Cagney/Murphy one…I am sure young Bob really liked that. Good stuff. 🙂

      Reply

  4. Hello again Cogerson, thanks for this page. As a movie buff of the classic era (particularly from 40s 50s and 60s), it’s very interesting for me. This is the kind of information that is really hard to find any-where else, and if time allows you, I would appreciate seeing this for more years, particularly some years in the 60s which seem to be lacking in your yearly pages. I realize this list is not supposed to be exhaustive but as you seem to include most films in 1959 that had at least some box office impact, you could consider adding the following (I put the Variety box office rentals when I could find them in brackets though can’t be sure of accuracy): Li’l Abner ($3.2M), The Big Fisherman ($3M), Al Capone ($2.5M), Middle of the Night ($1.5M), Gidget ($1.5M), A Private’s Affair ($1.5M), The Jayhawkers ($1M). Also, other 1959 films that may or may have not made a dent at the box office and could be considered are: Shadows (now a classic), The Crimson Kimono, These Thousand Hills, For the First Time, A Summer Place, The Killer Shrews, Ten Seconds to Hell, Battle of the Coral Sea, The Legend of Tom Dooley, The Young Land, Take a Giant Step, Crime and Punishment USA, The Hound-Dog Man, Jet Over the Atlantic, The Gene Krupa Story, A Stranger in My Arms.

    Reply

    1. Hey Phil….you would think….since these pages seem to be pretty popular….our 1939, 1946 and 1952 pages are in our Top 40 here at this website…we would do more of them……which we plan on doing….they just turn out to be pretty difficult…that I tend to just release the ones already in my database…versus doing all the heavy lifting required to get an exhaustive list out there.

      My Variety magazines that lists Top Grossers of the year…they list 82 movies…many are the ones you listed in your comment….the ones you included with rental numbers I will try and get included on the table by the end of the day. The pain in the rear part of these pages…that of the 82 movies listed….some are movies that were made in 1958….while some of the movies made in 1959….show up on the Top Grosser list of 1960…..still I have this information….and I should get it out there…for all the movie buffs of the classic era….that are in search of information.

      Reply

      1. Alright…this table is now….123 movies versus 110…..all the ones you listed rental numbers have been added to the table.

        Reply

        1. Thanks Cogerson, appreciate you getting these up there. The more comprehensive the better in my view.! I hate to be a stickler, but out of curiosity (and because you may remember I’m a James Garner fan), why did Up Periscope go down from $4.14M to $3.89M? What I have (which could be wrong as it just comes from Wikipedia) is that it had rentals of $1.5M same as Gidget for example – but your gross numbers show $3.89M for Up Periscope and $4.29M for Gidget. Meanwhile, the same source lists rentals of $1.8M for the Devil’s Disciple, but your gross for this one is lower than for the other two.

          Reply

          1. Hey Phil…..let’s see. We will do the easy one first….a few months ago I went to the USC archive library and actually saw the Warner Brothers Ledgers with my own eyes. Garner had a few movies listed there….Sayonara, Up Periscope and Cash McCall. From there I was able to get better numbers for those three movies. For Up Periscope they list domestic rentals at $1,363,000 and international rentals at $1,299,000. That breaks down to $54.70 in adjusted domestic gross and $106.70 in worldwide gross….so yes the total went down a little bit. Since you are a Garner fan…here are the stats for the other two movies….Sayonara $8,260,000 in domestic rentals or $369.90 million in gross and another $4,253,000 in international rentals or a massive $552.90 million in worldwide gross. Cash McCall is listed at $1,840,000 in domestic rentals or $64.20 million in gross and another $485,000 in international rentals for a worldwide gross of $81.20 million.

            As for The Devil’s Disciple….Variety lists the rentals at 900,000 in the bank and an estimated final total of $1,800,000. I have noticed that many times the estimated final total is over inflated by Variety. One of the Douglas books I used for research had the rental number at 1.20 million…..so I took the safe route and took the difference between what Variety actually had and what they were guessing….and came up with a rental number of $1,350,000….it was a case of battling sources…so I split the difference. Hope that explains it.

            Added bonus….Darby’s Rangers….$1,482,000 in domestic rentals and $1,316,000 in international rentals or $59.50 million (domestic) and $112.50 million (worldwide).
            Shoot Out At Medicine Bend ….$652,000 in domestic rentals and $497,000 in international rentals or $28.00 million (domestic) and $49.00 million (worldwide).

            My USC trip. https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/william-schaefer-warner-brothers-ledgers/

  5. Wow, some good box office in 59 plus some real classics! Of the 36 movies seen, my favs are Some like it Hot, The Nun’s Story, North by Northwest, Imitation of Life, On the Beach, Look back in Anger, Libel and, as a “Guilty Pleasure”, House on haunted Hill. Plan Nine from outer Space was too much even for my “varied” taste.
    12 Angry Men,Pillow Talk and Suddenly, last Summer are not up to my favs, but they come pretty close. I yet have to see Cuban Rebel Girls, if only for that title alone. A bit shocked about the lackluster performances of Deborah Kerr’s 1959 outings, but she survived and stayed around for a decade to come. Audrey Hepburn’s second film of that year, Green Mansions”, is hard to find here, but I’ve seen it once while on holiday in England. A strange, yet interesting movie. As always, a highly informative page, Mr. Cogerson!

    Reply

    1. Hey Lupino…thanks for checking out our 1959 movie page. Pretty much picked this year…so Steve’s beloved Ben-Hur could have some more UMR spotlight placed on his favorite movie. I think the output for the year was pretty impressive. Any year that can offer up North by Northwest, Some Like It Hot, Ben-Hur, On The Beach, Anatomy of a Murder and Rio Bravo is a great year.

      Right there with you on Suddenly, Last Summer….a very hard movie to get through….Mr. Williams strikes again…lol. I do not think many people have ever seen Flynn’s swan song. I have not seen Green Mansions….but I have lots of people saying some “not so nice things about it”. Thanks for sharing your movie thoughts on 1959 movies.

      Reply

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