So jump in the Cogerson Time Machine and let’s go back to January 1966.  If you were a film buff back then and interested in knowing box office grosses you were pretty much out of luck.  USA Today and their weekend box office report was still 16 years away.  Box Office Mojo and their daily reporting was still 32 years away and Ultimate Movie Rankings was still 45 years away from existing.

Nope…back then your main source of information was Variety magazine.  Now….granted you could see how a movie was doing in big cities like New York and Los Angeles on a weekly basis…that is…. if you could find a copy of Variety back then. That might have scratched the itch a little bit…but it had to be frustrating trying to keep track of how a movie was doing by only knowing how it did in a few select cities.

So with the lack of information out there…..Variety’s yearly anniversary issues had to be the highlight of the year for box office treasure hunters.  Usually published in the first week of January….the anniversary issue listed the Top Box Office Rental movies of the year and an All Time Box Office Rental Champ list.  Well over the years we have collected almost all of the Variety anniversary issues from 1940 to 1980.  There is lots of box office gold in those magazines.  Since we have fun looking at those yearly lists….we thought it would be a good idea to do a page that showed the Top 100 Rental movies of all-time.  The following table was from Variety’s January 6th, 1966 issue.

Top 100 All Time Box Office 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 movies by the studios that made the movies
• Sort movies by the stars of he movies
• Sort movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
• Sort 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 movie received.
• Sort movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR)Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.