1960 Top Box Office Movies

Finding box office information for movies made before 1980 is not an easy task.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1960 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 1960 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1960.  This page will looks at 119 1960 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.    This only represents about 25% of the movies made in 1960….but should cover the top box office movies.

Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine in 1960’s The Apartment

Our UMR Top 50 of 1960

1960 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 1960 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1960 Top Grossing Movies by stars of the movie
  • Sort 1960 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1960 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 1960 Top Grossing Movies received and how many Oscar® wins each 1960 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1960 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.
1960’s Psycho

 Top earners in 1960 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 1960….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 1960 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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43 thoughts on “1960 Top Box Office Movies”

  1. Hi Mr. Cogerson,

    Here is a list of a few movies I found in Wikipedia and IMDB for the year 1960.
    You can review and see if you want to list them.

    Song Without End: Gross-$1.50 million USD, source-Wikipedia
    Macumba Love: Gross- USA: $3,000,000, source IMDB
    The Virgin Spring; Gross-$700,000 USD, source-Wikipedia
    Purple Noon: Gross-$618,090 USD, source-IMDB

    Thx

    Mike

    Reply

    1. Hey Mike. Thanks for the stats….somehow…I missed Song Without End when I was researching this page….and it is sitting right on that Variety Top Grosser chart. Actually it was fun re-visiting my notebook of box office stats…I used to spend hours in that notebook while doing these yearly reviews. Now it pretty much collects dust. As for the other three…..the Bergman movies are always difficult to get box office….so I am not really confident about the gross…but went with the number. Macumba Love looks pretty high….but I used a rental number that is just a tick under the 1 million rental mark….which put the gross aound 2.9 million versus 3.0. And finally Purple Noon….the source for that comes from The Box Office Story from Laurent’s friend….so went wit it….though I suspect that might be the re-release numbers. In the end all four of the movies you provided information on….are all on the table. Thanks for providing the information.

      Reply

  2. BRUCE

    1 I put a few deliberate errors into my last post to you so that I could have the fun of trying out the correction button and the facility works perfectly. The “beat the clock” necessity only adds to the fun!

    2 I take it there’s no way you can give me a facility that will allow me a 5 minutes go at some of Joel’s stuff!?

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob….glad you like the “edit” button. Finally a comment widget was compatible with my website provider. Maybe a “Joel Hirschhorn edit” will be the next comment widget I find and upload…lol.

      Reply

  3. HELLO AGAIN BRUCE AND WELCOME TO THE CORRECTION BUTTON!
    1 For me 1960 was a marker of changes I noticed happening in the cinema – for example:

    (1) Your 1960 table still records a few entries from my 1950s action heroes like Audie Murphy, Randy Scott and Laddie but these like others among their kindred spirits such as John Payne and Rory Calhoun were clearly starting to fade.

    (2) Brando’s string of 1950s big hits came to a thudding halt with the flop The Fugitive Kind and I can vividly recall one critic lamenting “Wayne has never looked older.” Ageing did not affect the Duke’s box office popularity for some time and Brando would get a further lease of box office life in the 1970s but he was never really the Brando of the 1950s again.

    (3) Moreover Bill Holden another of my 50s idols in A list pictures had a massive 1960 hit with The World of Suzie Wong but that film in effect brought to a close Bill’s continuous period as a top box office star and for a long time that was a sore point for me.***

    (4) By 1960 movies alone were no longer sufficient to sustain our No 1 film magazine “Picturegoer” and I remember sitting is a café with a friend, both of us nearly in tears because our fave magazine had been amalgamated with a fashion magazine and the new publication called “Date” to attract more of the young lovers of the day.

    2 In short I was a bit like resort proprietor Kellerman in the 1987 Dirty Dancing who sensed the once and for all passing of a cherished era. ***Indeed your charts today demonstrate that my woes regarding for example Golden Holden were justified. Your figures show that from Stalag 17 in 1953 until the 1960 Suzie Wong Bill made 16 films which earned a massive $3.2 billion [average approx. $200 million] in adjusted domestic revenues. However in the next dozen years following Suzie, Golden made 12 movies that earned just some $685 million in adjusted domestic grosses [average around $57 million].

    3 Anyway your review of 1960 [my last year as a teenager] is a memento for me of a time of great change and is therefore most welcomed

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob…..great comment. Really enjoyed reading it. I like your breakdown of your favorites and their box office successes and the not to happy decreasing. I like the way you mentioned Kellerman and his sense of time passing. I am currently seeing it with “streaming”. Just tonight our family was out for dinner. BERN1960….asked SoC2 (Son of Cogerson 2) where he kept his DVDs….and SoC2 said..”Old people have dvds…all of my stuff is safely away on the cloud”. Anyway I came home and saw my two massive dvd shelves and realized the peak of DVD collecting is coming to an end.

      Sorry got sidetracked. In your absence….we have gone down to 1935 and up to 1961….so our yearly reviews cover 1935 to 1961…..our goal is to have 1930 to 1969 done by the middle of the year. So I guess I am saying….here come your 20s….lol.

      Thanks for the interesting take on 1960 and the last year teenage Bob year….it got me thinking…my last teenage year was 1986.

      Reply

  4. And again so many pages to catch up on!!!
    Gold Medal, I think, goes to Greg, for I have “only” seen 55 movies listed. Many favorites like Psycho, Dark at the Top of the Stairs, The Sundowners- love the performances of all 4 principles here- Never on a Sunday, The World of Suzie Wong and some more, but I’m going to mention the “flawed” favorites, some for me stand out because of a single performance or one or two great scenes: Let’s make Love falls into the latter category, but Monroe’s delivery and dance to “My Heart belongs to Daddy” is one for the books. The Entertainer offers a great performance by Sir Laurence Olivier. From the Terrace, with wonderful support from Myrna Loy. A grade B sci fi from GB, Village of the Damned, that was just different in it’s treatment of children on screen and thus quite frightening. Girl of the Night, an obscurity giving Anne Francis the Star treatment and the cult favorite The Little Shop of Horrors plus Disney’s highly successfull kiddie asventure The Swiss Family Robinson. Audrey Hepburn and Lillian Gish in The Unforgiven…still not certain how to judge the depiction of native americans in this one, but a fascinating watch nevertheless. Thanks for getting out another yearly chart!
    And WOW! An edit button!!!!!

    Reply

    1. Hey Lupino
      1. Thanks for checking out our latest pages….I have been busy.
      2. You can’t win the Gold every time…..lol……your total is still pretty impressive.
      3. I have never seen Never on Sunday but I like the music.
      4. Glad we agree on Psycho and The Sundowners…I love those too.
      5. Of all the movies you mentioned….I have not seen The Entertainer or Girl of the Night…actually never even heard of the second movie.
      6. Glad you noticed the “edit” button…it is already making things easier on me.
      Good feedback as always.

      Reply

      1. Hey Bruce,

        Girl Of The Night is not only notable as one of the few films for which Anne Francis received star billing but it also features the acting debut of actress Eileen Fulton who is an absolute American Soap Opera Legend. Shortly after appearing in Girl Of The Night and starting in May of 1960, Eileen Fulton started appearing on AS THE WORLD TURNS as Lisa Hughes and she continued to play that part up until September of 2010 when the show was cancelled.

        Reply

        1. Hey Greg….thanks for the information on Girl of the Night and Eileen Fulton. That was one awesome long run for Ms. Fulton. Good feedback.

          Reply

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