Bruce Willis Movies

Source UltimateMovieRankings.com

*Bruce Willis is taking a break from acting as he battles aphasia, a neurological condition that affects the ability to communicate.  3/30/2022

Want to know the best Bruce Willis movies?  How about the worst Bruce Willis movies?  Curious about Bruce Willis’s box office grosses or which Bruce Willis movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Bruce Willis movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place.

I have followed Bruce Willis’ career since he hit the big time with his star making role as David Addison on Moonlighting. I still think the Moonlighting 3 episode story arc with Mark Harmon,was some the best television I have ever seen and the pinnacle of that series.  Since Moonlighting, Bruce Willis has had a very busy career, making over 60 movies over the last 27 years. It has been a roller coaster ride…the highs….. movies like Pulp Fiction, most of the Die Hards, and The Sixth Sense…..the lows….movies like The Whole Ten Yards, Hudson Hawk, Bonfire of the Vanities and North.  His IMDb page shows 145 acting credits since 1980.  In the table below, Ultimate Movie Rankings ranks movies in 6 different sortable columns.

Bruce Willis Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews, and awards.

Bruce Willis 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 Bruce Willis movies by movie title and movie trailers.
  • Sort Bruce Willis movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Bruce Willis movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Bruce Willis movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Bruce Willis 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 Bruce Willis movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Bruce Willis movie won.
  • Sort Bruce Willis 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.

Possibly Interesting Facts About Bruce Willis

1. Walter Bruce Willis was born on March 19, 1955, in the town of Idar-Oberstein, West Germany.  His dad was an American while his mother was a German.

2.  Bruce Willis worked as a bartender when he was a struggling actor in New York City.

3.  In 1984, Bruce Willis left New York City to audition for roles in Los Angeles.

4.  Bruce Willis’ big break was getting the role in the television series Moonlighting (1985-1989).  Glenn Gordon Caron had to fight with ABC to put Willis in the lead role having already signed Shepherd for both the pilot and series. Caron claims he tested Willis about a third of the way through testing over 2,000 actors, knew “this was the guy” immediately, and had to fight through twice as many more acting tests and readings while arguing with ABC executives before receiving (initial) conditional authorization to cast Willis in the pilot. ABC, according to Caron, did not feel that anyone viewing would think there could possibly be any “believable” sexual tension between Shepherd and Willis.

5.  Although Bruce Willis was the 115th choice to play John McClane in 1988’s Die Hard….he was given an unheard, at the time, salary of $5 million dollars.

6.  Bruce Willis was the only celebrity that attended Julia Roberts’ wedding to Daniel Moder. Their friendship is referred to in Ocean’s Twelve (2004), when he mistakes Tess Ocean for Julia Roberts, and asks her about ‘Danny’.

7.   Bruce Willis was the first actor to ever “act” in a video game (Apocalypse (1998)). No one before had ever done voice work along with having their likeness and movements digitally added to the game, as well as receiving prominent billing on the game’s cover.

8.  Bruce Willis was considered for the role of Kyle Reese in The Terminator (1984), which went to Michael Biehn.

9.  Bruce Willis has been married two times.  He has 5 daughters.  His first marriage was to Demi Moore.  His current marriage is to Emma Heming.

10. Check out Bruce Willis’ career compared to current and classic actors.  Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.

Personal Top Ten Bruce Willis Movies

  • Die Hard
  • The Fifth Element
  • Looper
  • Lucky Number Slevin
  • Nobody’s Fool
  • Pulp Fiction
  • Sin City
  • The Sixth Sense
  • Twelve Monkeys
  • Unbreakable

Our You Tube Video that goes through the Rankings all of Bruce Willis’ movies.

My Letterboxd.com Bruce Willis Movie Reviews.

Steve Lensman’s Bruce Willis Top 50 Movies You Tube Video

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

 

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245 thoughts on “Bruce Willis Movies”

  1. Indeed on the site’s ranking lists [whilst they for the most part accurately reflect the greatest of the movie stars down the decades] there are a number of performers undeservedly in my opinion accorded far greater prestige than the mostly-absent Willis and Diaz.

    This is especially so of the site’s women’s rankings that include a number of females who, probably to an extent because they won this acting award or that, are ranked in the top 25 or so despite the fact that they arguably couldn’t get even attract the attendants and staff into a cinema let alone mass audiences in the way that Willis/Diaz did at their peak.

    “To be considered a REAL star you have to be able to pull your weight at the box office. There are a number of actresses around today who are classed as stars but would have been regarded as mere starlets in my own days at the top.” – Elizabeth Ruth Davis aka Bette.

    Anyway whilst every time Christmas comes around I will continue to think of Bing and never John McClane I will certainly miss Brucie the rest of the year round. Still he is now in his late sixties and Wikipedia lists his “years active” as 1978-1922.

    A 44-year career is in fact highly impressive when one considers that Ty Power, Flynn, Bogie, Dean, John Garfield and Ladd were all actually sadly deceased by the time they had reached the anniversary of their 50th birthday; with the likes of Gable and Cooper unfortunately following them from this world at the ages of 59 and 60 respectively. Therefore whilst one feels very sorry for Brucie in terms of his health affliction he IS thankfully still with us!

    So please enjoy your retirement as much as you can Walt Willis – you’ve earned it whatever the Cogerson ranking lists say – and after all The Bible itself at John 4:43-44 tells us that “Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honour in his hometown.”

    Indeed when I consider my lasting [later] image of you PHYSICALLY in conjunction with the great entertainment you have almost always given me, I am reminded of a line from the 1965 Sonny and Cher classic hit song I Got You Babe:

    “Well let them say your hair’s too long
    I don’t care, with you I can’t go wrong.”

    EXIT screen Giant; but still leaving us with our memories of not just enjoyable action movies but also the classy 6th Sense – and in my case Tom Mix. the role that first drew me to you

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob. Good comment on Mr. Willis. I had been hoping he would transition to supporting roles in bigger budget movies. This recent news has thinking that will never happen. I had also hoped another Die Hard would be made so the series did not end with the truly dreadful Die Hard 5: Boring Movie in Russia. I am glad that his role in Sunset made you a fan. That is one of my least liked Bruce movies…right down there with Breakfast of Champions and The Whole Ten Yards. Hope all is going well. Recently for my birthday, WoC, contacted and secured autographs for some stars that you would appreciate….one from Pat Boone, one from Dyan Cannon, one from Katharine Ross, one from Patrick Wayne, one from Jacqueline Bissett and one from Marsha Mason. One day I will have a page that shows those autographs. Good stuff. Sorry that Cameron Diaz did not make my Top 50…..seems it is time to redo that list….maybe she will make it with the new rankings formula.

      Reply

  2. From the screen that is. I have never been into action movies, at least not in the way they are styled in the modern cinema; but I make an exception for Clint [though I am not a great fan his westerns] Arnie [because of his dry humour expressed in that deliciously quaint accent of his] and the great Mr Swear – heck I liked even his Tom Mix which most others pan.

    I have to say though that whilst being no prude myself I found his use of swear words on screen rather gratuitous. Indeed with Walter Bruce Willis the 4-letter words almost WERE the script at times! Probably his only peers in the “expletive deleted” clan are Pesci and DeNiro – and that’s ALL TIME because in the classic era they didn’t swear [or do almost anything that wasn’t circumspect] in movies!

    In fact last night at my Amateur Movie Buffs’ group meeting where he is generally well-liked one wit couldn’t help quipping “If they hadn’t put the letter F in the alphabet there might well have been no “Bruce Willis”.

    And another of my fellow-buffs joked that [just as Brando is said to have permanently changed the style of American acting] maybe Willis should be credited with changing forever the vocabulary employed in action films! Maybe THAT’s his legacy!”

    He has left us with much more than that though and I have long argued that this site’s ranking criteria seriously underestimates the magnitude of his stardom, not reflecting how his great box office clout in his heyday more than compensated for his perceived inability to tick other mostly in my view less-important boxes in the site’s ranking criteria at least in terms of stardom.

    In my own perception that ranking criteria undervalues Mr Swear in the way it does Cameron Diaz though even she was never in the stand-alone “box office gold” league that HE was part-of for so many years; his top 5 worldwide adjusted grosses for example in the Cogerson charts being a whopping $4.3 billion collectively -wow! top THAT if you can Myrna Loy.

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob. Thanks for sharing these thoughts on Bruce. I had been reading for awhile now that something might be wrong with Mr. Willis. There is a scene in Gasoline Alley that is almost painful to watch. He keeps saying “Yeah” over and over while Luke Wilson provides the entire dialogue of the scene. As for his swearing….the 80s had lots of cussing….as action movies did not worry about a having a R rating. As for my rankings of Bruce’s career……personally he is in my all-time Top 3 with Cary Grant and Michael Caine. Statistically, he has the box office but so many badly reviewed movies and almost no Oscar love hurts his cause in my system. Still, I can only agree with your last paragraph….overall he seems to be undervalued.

      Reply

    1. Hey Dan. Sadly, I was reading about this news when you commented. Bruce will always be one of my favorites. Hopefully, he can rebound from this bad news. Maybe not as an actor, but to be able to enjoy his retirement. Thanks for the heads up. Best wishes to the Willis family!

      Reply

  4. Bruce Willis is the # 18 most connected actor of the 1990’s, the # 33 most connected actor of the 2000’s and the # 45 most connected of the 2010’s (3 decades).

    Reply

  5. Hi bob, this is a really comprehensive deduction of Bruce Willis Movies. Most of his movies really did well, and The Sixth Sense is really a good movie of Bruce!

    Reply

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