1976 Top Grossing Movies

1976’s Rocky was the biggest hit of the year and won the Oscar for Best Picture

This movie page looks at 125 1976 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 1976 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 1976 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1976.  Obviously many movies (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest and Dog Day Afternoon) made in 1975 earned box office dollars in 1976.  On the other side many movies made in 1976 made money in 1977 and later.  This page will looks at 125 1976 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.

Drivel Part:  So why 1976?  There are a couple of reasons….first it was a request from Flora….who happens to have been born in 1976.  Secondly …..this was the last year that some of my favorites (John Wayne & Alfred Hitchcock) made movies.  And thirdly….our previous yearly UMR pages have been very popular.

1976 Best Picture Oscar nominated movies

Our UMR Top 50 of 1976

1976 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 1976 Top Grossing Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1976 Top Grossing Movies by actual box office grosses (in millions)
  • Sort 1976 Top Grossing Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
  • Sort 1976 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 each1976 Top Grossing Movies received
  • Sort by how many Oscar® wins each 1976 Top Grossing Movies received.
  • Sort 1976 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.

Kris Kristofferson & Barbra Streisand in the 2nd biggest hit of 1976…A Star Is Born

My Main Sources

Source 1: Variety – January 5th, 1977 Pages 14 and 44.

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 1976….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 1976 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

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

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44 thoughts on “1976 Top Grossing Movies

  1. Hello Bruce,

    I’ve seen 22 movies of the list. But they were all good. My favorites are Rocky, Taxi Driver, All The President’s Men, Josey Wales. But the movie that most impressed me was Marathon Man. It terrified me and today I’m afraid of dentists lol.
    Steve was talking about assault. It’s cult movie in France. I saw it few months ago, and it is still good.
    On this list, the most succesfull movie in France was King Kong with more than 4 millions admissions. Big. The second was Taxi Driver. It was the biggest success of Martin Scorsese in France until Shuter Island.
    About Rocky, it was a flop in France, but also in Germany and Italy. In France, Sylvester Stallone became a star with the video and mostly with First Blood. After this las movie, Rocky 3 was a hit.

    1. Hey Laurent….thanks for the comment and the visit. Somewhat surprised that Rocky was a flop and that Assault on Precinct 13 became a cult classic. Wow France really got behind Taxi Driver. Kong took over Paris…very cool information. Thanks for the tally count and all the French box office information.

  2. Looking at the list gave me deja vu. I recently completed a poster page for 1976 on my poster blog.

    Looking at my movie database for 1976 the only American film I have on DVD that isn’t on your list is John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13.

    Let’s see altogether I’ve seen… 43 of the 125, only about a third. Favorites include – Rocky, Logan’s Run, The Omen, Carrie, King Kong, Silver Streak, The Enforcer, The Eagle Has Landed, Midway, Marathon Man, Pink Panther Strikes Again and Taxi Driver.

    I saw a bunch of those films at the cinema when they were brand new. Some of the not so famous films I’ve watched at the cinema in that year – The Stranger and the Gunfighter (aka Blood Money), Exit the Dragon, Enter the Tiger, Survive! (filmed again as ‘Alive’) and Cannonball (aka Carquake, forerunner to The Cannonball Run).

    Good to see The Omen ranked high on the UMR and critics chart, one of my favorites I’ve watched it a zillion times. No problem with Rocky and Taxi Driver (Scorsese’s best film) topping those charts.

    Nice work Bruce. 1977 next? Vote Up!

    1. Hey Steve…I will have to check out your 1976 poster page. I remember seeing some of these movies at the cinemas too. I remember when I thought Gus was the greatest movie of all-time. I still think it is the best football mule kicking movie ever made…lol.

      Your 43 watched had me (35) and Flora (23) beat. So Lee Van Cleef got you in theaters to see The Stranger and the Gunfighter…..interesting. I remember seeing King Kong in a packed theater…and then getting a King Kong board game for my birthday.

      I would say The Eagle Has Landed was my dad’s favorite of that year….though All The President’s Men is a close second. He actually worked at the Washington Post when that story was taking place.

      Great comment…thanks for stopping by and checking out our latest page.

    1. Hey Flora….glad you found your requested 1976 movie page. I have seen 35 of your birth year movies….compared to your 23 and Steve’s 43 watched. Thanks for the visit and the comment.

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