Biggest Box Office Hits of 1936

1936 gave us the classic Charlie Chaplin movie Modern Times

This movie page looks at 1936 Top Box Office Movies.  Finding box office information for movies made in the 1930s and 1940s is extremely difficult.   For somebody looking for box office information on 1936 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 33,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1936 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1936.  Obviously many movies made in 1935 earned box office dollars in 1936.  On the other side many movies made in 1936 made money in 1937 and later.  This page will looks at 152 1936 Top Box Office 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.

The following massive table only includes the movies made in 1936 that are in our database.  Since we are constantly adding new movies to our database….this page will quickly become obsolete.  We will try and update this page on a regular basis.

Clark Gable & Spencer Tracy in 1936’s biggest hit…San Francisco

Our UMR Top 50 of 1936

1936 Top 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 1936 Top Box Office Movies by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.
  • Sort 1936 Top Box Office Movies by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort 1936 Top Box Office Movies by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort 1936 Top Box Office 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 1936 Top Box Office Movies received.
  • Sort 1936 Top Box Office 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.

The Great Ziegfeld won the Oscar Best Picture of 1936….but our UMR movie of 1936 is Mr. Deeds Goes To Town

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: William Schaefer Warner Brothers Ledgers

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions

Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1942 by Tino Balio

Source 6: Twentieth Century-Fox A Corporate and Financial History by Aubrey Solomon

Source 7:  Wikipedia

Source 8:  IMDb.com

Source 9:  “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy

Source 10: Hollywood Power Stats by Christopher Reynolds

Due to length concerns…..we went ahead and created a second table of information of 1936 movies….including all the adjusted Worldwide Grosses in our database.

1936 Worldwide Adjusted Grosses.

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42 thoughts on “Biggest Box Office Hits of 1936

    1. Hey Dan….thanks for the catch. When I was typing that in…..my Spidey sense was saying something was wrong….I guess I should have listened….lol. Will fix that errror when I get home from work.

  1. I have seen 36 films from 1936.

    Top 10 Favourite movies include:

    San Francisco
    My Man Godfrey
    Libelled Lady
    Dodsworth
    Under Two Flags
    After The Thin Man
    Born to Dance
    Sabotage
    Swing Time
    The Petrified Forest

    The highest box office film I’ve seen is 1: San Francisco.

    The lowest rated box office film I’ve seen is 132: Rembrandt.

    1. Hey Flora….thanks for the visit, comment and tally. I have seen 21 of these movies to your 36. I have seen 7 of your Top 10. After the Thin Man and The Petrified Forest are two of my favorites as well. My lowest rated movie seen was Things to Come…which is one of Steve’s favorites. Good feedback as always.

  2. 152 films! My recent Clint Eastwood Top 50 looks puny by comparison. 🙂

    I’ve seen 28 of the 152 films listed. Favorites include – Charge of the Light Brigade, The Devil Doll, The Invisible Ray, Lloyds of London, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Modern Times, Sabotage, San Francisco, Show Boat, Swing Time, Tarzan Escapes and Things to Come.

    Lots of favorites, it was a good movie year for me.

    Top rated movies I haven’t seen yet – Dodsworth, Fury and The Great Ziegfeld.

    Looking at my database there are 55 films from 1936 in movie collection –

    After the Thin Man
    Anthony Adverse
    Big Brown Eyes
    Born to Dance
    Bullets or Ballots
    Camille
    Ceiling Zero
    Charge of the Light Brigade
    Charlie Chan at the Opera
    Charlie Chan’s Secret
    Conquest of the Air
    Devil Doll ,The
    Dracula’s Daughter
    Fire Over England
    Follow the Fleet
    Fury
    Garden of Allah ,The
    General Died at Dawn ,The
    Gold Diggers of 1937
    Great Ziegfeld ,The
    Invisible Ray ,The
    Isle of Fury
    King of the Pecos
    Last of the Mohicans ,The
    Libeled Lady
    Lloyds of London
    Man Who Changed His Mind ,The
    Mary of Scotland
    Mister/ Mr. Deeds Goes to Town
    Modern Times
    My Man Godfrey
    Our Relations
    Petrified Forest ,The
    Plainsman ,The
    Prisoner of Shark Island
    Reefer Madness
    Rembrandt
    Romeo & Juliet
    Sabotage
    San Francisco
    Satan Met a Lady
    Secret Agent
    Show Boat
    Small Town Girl
    Speed
    Sweeney Todd
    Swing Time
    Tarzan Escapes
    Things to Come
    Trail of the Lonesome Pine
    Under Two Flags
    Walking Dead ,The
    Wedding Present
    Wife vs Secretary
    Winds of the Wasteland

    There’s a few there that isn’t on your chart and a bunch I still haven’t watched.

    Epic work Bruce, that should keep the stats freaks happy for a few hours. Vote Up!

    1. Hey Steve…thinking this is the biggest list of 1936 box office anywhere on the internet. Your massive Clint video should be pretty popular. Not sure how many people are searching for movies 81 years old.

      I have seen 7 of your favorites. Sorry Things To Come did not rate higher. I think that movie gained momentum as the years passed.

      Thanks for the feedback.
      Let’s see you have seen 28 to my 21 but we both trail Flora’s 36. At least combined we have her best….. sometimes that does not happen….lol.

  3. HI BRUCE

    1 As you know I rely a lot on your annual reviews for my private statistical projects so I was wondering when we might get an other one

    2 1936 is a good year with which to further expand the annual review series as it can boast such classics as San Francisco, Modern Times and Mr Deeds, not to mention Another Thin Woman!

    3 I loved the miniature still of Old Cantankerous and the King sparring and I also admire the little poster from reproduction from Mr Deeds. However I hadn’t realised previously that Jean Arthur didn’t get equal billing to Coop in that one so I’ll have to remove it from Jean’s page in my own database.as I normally included in performers’ schedules just movies in which they have star billing. Remember “Less is more!” Anyway a warm welcom to the 1936 Annual Review.

      1. Hey Bob….James Stewart, William Powell, me and the most successful box office actress of all-time forgive you for your mistake…lol.

    1. Hey Bob
      1. Glad you like this page…..between this page and our new Top 500 page….we have come to a conclusion….a different understanding between me and WoC has caused a major issue with consistency on the website.
      2. I was thinking…we were holding off on using a new average ticket cost….well we are using the current price….which means everytime I produce a new page…those are the new box office estimates. I thought I had until 2018 before I would have to worry about updating all of these pages.
      3. You have been noticing the minor differences….I guess I was using the ostrich with the head in the sand approach…by not really looking into the differences you were noticing.
      4. Well the good news is…..I realize and more importantly WoC realized that with the size of this website….that is now impossible to update all of these pages fast enough……it took months to switch to the new UMR formula…(heck I still see some that are using the old formula…looking at lots of the director pages out there). So for the first time WoC is working hard on making this page dynamic. I am actually looking at her notes now…don’t understand them….but they are here.
      5. So hopefully the “dynamic” train is back on the track. Which will include some UMR formula changes and a way to make our UMR score make more sense. Gotta get rid of the fact that average is 40. Thinking about a grade scale or a way to make the numbers make sense to someone seeing a table for the first time.
      6. As for Jean Arthur….Capra loved her…..she was a huge part of the success of Mr. Deeds….seems unfair to drop her from your database…..but it is your database….you gotta go with what you believe is the right way to go.
      Thanks for the feedback…..good stuff as always.

  4. This was supposed to be an easy page to put together….instead it took hours and most of the night and morning….very frustrating…..but we now have yearly pages from 1936 to 1949…..not too bad.

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