Marlon Brando Movies

Want to know the best Marlon Brando movies?  How about the worst Marlon Brando movies?  Curious about Marlon Brando’s box office grosses or which Marlon Brando movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Marlon Brando movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which one got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.

Marlon Brando (1924-2004) owned the 1950s as an actor. He received 5 Oscar® nominations for Best Actor between 1952 and 1958. He had it all…. blockbusters, critical acclaim, and an Oscar® win. His movies generated over 200 million ticket sales in the 1950s. Unfortunately the 1960s were not so kind to him. One could argue, that every movie he made in the 1960s was a box office failure. By the early 1970s he was considered box office poison. It was during this time that movie magic would happen again. That of course, was his role in The Godfather.

The Godfather was a blockbuster hit that won Oscars® for Best Picture and Best Actor. The following year he earned another Oscar® nomination for Last Tango in Paris. Then he pretty much stop making movies. Over the last 30 years of his life he only made 10 more movies and they were pretty much supporting parts.

His IMDb page shows 47 acting credits from 1949-2006. This page will rank 37 Marlon Brando movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information.  Television appearances, shorts, cameos, video game roles and direct to DVD movies were not included in the rankings.

Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in 1951's A Streetcar Named Desire
Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire

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

Marlon Brando 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 by Marlon Brando’s co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Marlon Brando movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort Marlon Brando movies by their yearly box office rank
  • Sort Marlon Brando 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 Marlon Brando movie received.
  • Sort Marlon Brando 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.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Marlon Brando Table

  1. Sixteen Marlon Brando movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 43.24% of his movies listed. The Godfather (1972) was his biggest box office hit.
  2. An average Marlon Brando movie earned $144.60 million in adjusted box office gross.
  3. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  28 of Marlon Brando’s movies are rated as good movies…or 75.67% of his movies.  The Godfather (1972)  was his highest rated movie while Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) was his lowest rated movie.
  4. Eighteen Marlon Brando movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 48.64% of his movies.
  5. Seven Marlon Brando’s movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 18.91% of his movies.
  6. A “good movie” Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) is 60.00 or above.  24 Marlon Brando movies scored higher that average….or 64.86% of his movies.  The Godfather (1972) got the the highest UMR Score while Christopher Columbus: The Discovery (1992) got the lowest UMR Score.
Marlon Brando in 1955's Guys and Dolls
Marlon Brando in 1955’s Guys and Dolls

Adjusted box office grosses are used to make it easier, to figure out how successful a movie was when it was originally released and compare that to our current box office numbers. For example: The classic On the Waterfront grossed $9,240,000 in 1954. In 2014, $9,240,000 million would have ranked 134th for the year….right behind Mom’s Night Out. However its adjusted box office gross of $163,200,000 million would have finished 19th for the year right behind 18th place Gone Girl. 

And finally….just found this page from Luna B. on HubPages….a very interesting read.  Marlon Brando’s Top Ten Movies….highly recommend checking it out.

Steve’s Expanded Marlon Brando You Tube Video

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

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193 thoughts on “Marlon Brando Movies”

  2. Hey Bob
    Just listened to the auto commentary of The Score. Frank Oz….made a few mentions to the difficulties of working with Brando. About the only thing we would mention was that at times things got “tense” between the two of them……and a couple of times he said “we were actually getting along when we filmed this scene”. Despite those two comments….the majority of the time Oz only had high praise for your boy Brando. I think he mentioned that Brando was a genius four to five times. It was nice to re-visit The Score….love the finally shot of Brando giving a little smile as he watched a television report that showed Norton as a wanted man and a question mark to represent DeNiro. Pretty sure that smile was the last time Brando would ever appear in a movie.

    Reply

    1. BRUCE

      1 Thanks for the link. There’ll be some watching to do! And as a bonus I see there is one about Sir Maurice which will also interest me for as you know from my recent list he is in my own Top 20 favourite actors of all time.

      2 Interesting to see that Denis Hopper talks about MB in another one of them as Brando for some reason detested Hopper and when they had supposed scenes together in Apocalypse Now he reportedly would not allow Denis to be in his company before the cameras and he forced Hopper to make his contribution from a separate set and the the Hopper contribution was later spliced into Marlon’s in the editing room.

      3 I’ll see if Hopper talks about that in the video.but you often wonder if guys like MB as they grew older and adulation was heaped on them were actually driven mad by the whole thing. Or as somebody said in Road House was Bud “born an a** ***e and naturally got bigger as he grew up”.

      4 It’s no surprise that Babs Streisand is in one of the Brando videos because she’s a big fan and apparently they went on road trips together.which she claims were platonic. However they met in a formal setting to discuss making a film together but according to newspaper reports the project fell through as her then boyfriend had tagged along and MB got drunk and made a pass at Babs while her boyfriend was in the room which made me wonder if those trips had been truly platonic given that even with drink in him on the occasion mentioned he was forward and confident enough to make the pass. Classic Russel Crowe stuff really!

      Reply

      1. BRUCE

        Oops! I’ve done a Joseph Cotton but twice over this time as Denis should be Dennis and Russel should be Russell – apologies and I thought I’d get in first before there’s an outcry on this site.

        Reply

    2. STEVE 1 On this site Bruce gave me a link to a group of Brando-related videos on U-tube. Robin Williams does a funny Brando Godpop impersonation and Sir Anthony Hopkins opined that the great charismatic acting/musical stars such as Monroe, Michael Jackson, Elvis, Brando, Astaire and Sinatra seemed to be largely an American phenomenon that other countries found it impossible or hard to replicate.

      2 One of the videos was of Scorsese presenting a restoration of One Eyed Jacks at the 54th NY Film Festival last year. He raved about Mr M’s direction of the film and said that Scorsese and Spielberg considered it such a masterpiece that they had collaborated for a year on the restoration that the audience was about to see. According to Scorsese it was based on the life of Billy the Kid which I never knew.

      3 Another video had an interview with Sean Penn who was apparently a close friend of MB and he led with the usual hyperbolic stuff about Brando being the “8th Wonder of the World” and also a role model to actors of Sean’s type and generation. We know the latter to be broadly true but I had to reach for a pinch of salt when Sean said firmly “He is the Leonardo Da Vinci or Picasso of our profession. There will NEVER be an actor who is greater than Brando.” Now unless Penn can see into the future how does he know for example that the Work Horse as he beavers away with reviews for this site will not discover some even greater “mumbling twitching boy”?

      4 They turned to Sean’s relationship with Marlon and the interviewer asked about the activities in which they engaged together. Among the things Sean mentioned was their liking for mutual storytelling about their experiences and Penn said Mr M was a great storyteller and was very “ARTICULATE” in the way he told his stories. At that point I paused the video, repeated to my wife Sean’s comments and said to her, “Got to write this down before I forget it. Steve will want to hear about it.”

      Reply

      1. Good post Bob, thanks. The young actors that came after Brando, from Dean to Pacino to De Niro to Penn to Depp and onwards practically worshipped Mr. Mumbles so I’m not surprised to hear Penn say all that stuff about him. It’s the older guys that were a bit sniffy about MB. What did Olivier say to a dishevelled Dustin Hoffman on the set of Marathon Man? “Try acting dear boy”. 🙂

        Reply

        1. STEVE
          1 Thanks for feedback and quote. Your fellow countryman Hitch came out with something similar to Paul Newman when they made Torn Curtain together.

          2 Old Hollywood was split when it came to Mr M, Tracy telling Mrs Mumbles “Your husband is an idiot.” and Cagney saying “Never seen a Brando movie. Never intend to.” However the more level-headed Cary Grant admired Mr M and Bogie said of him “This guy will still be acting when the rest of us are peeling potatoes.” After seeing Godpop great gangster actor Eddie Robinson said “He’s my offspring.” Chuck was also a Mumbles admirer and said once that he was one of the few who deserved a high salary.

          Reply

          1. It’s a shame Chuck and Mumbles never made a film together.

            You mentioned One Eyed Jacks, it’s been ages since I last saw this film and I remember not being very keen on it back then. I wouldn’t mind watching it again in that restored version.It’s out in June and I’m tempted to buy it.

            Amazon has a list of extras included on the disc –

            New 4K restoration by Universal Pictures and The Film Foundation, in consultation with Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg

            High Definition Blu-ray

            Brand new audio commentary by Stephen Prince, author of Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies, recorded exclusively for this release
            Introduction by Martin Scorsese

            Marlon Brando: The Wild One, Paul Joyce s 1996 documentary on the actor, featuring interviews with Dennis Hopper, Shelley Winters, Martin Sheen and Anthony Hopkins

            Additional, previously unseen interview material from Marlon Brando: The Wild One with Francis Ford Coppola and Arthur Penn.

            That’s an awfully tempting disc dear boy. 🙂

          2. And also included – an Illustrated collector s booklet containing new writing on the film by Jason Wood and Filippo Ulivieri, Karl Malden on Marlon Brando, Paul Joyce on Marlon Brando: The Wild One and an excerpt from Stefan Kanfer s Somebody: The Reckless Life and Remarkable Career of Marlon Brando.

            Nice.

    1. HI BRUCE

      1 Thanks for the link. I had not seen that video and loved a lot of the stories within stories particularly the ones about Paul Muni, Jack Kennedy and Anna Magnani.

      2 I was also interested in the confirmation that Brando had been 1st choice for Lawrence of Arabia as had never been sure whether that was pure fiction by publicity agents. However I think posterity can thank him for turning down the role as I feel it would have been hard for anyone to match Peter O’Toole whose Lawrence often turns up at the top of lists of greatest screen performances of all time.

      3 The Freshman was of course the film under discussion in the video and Brando’s co-star Matthew Broderick who was also frequently mentioned in the video claims that for that movie he had a dressing room opposite Marlon’s and Matthew drilled a hole in his own door so that he could watch the Great One come and go. I sometimes think most actors are eccentric.

      4 Anyway thanks again for the link – great fun.

      Reply

      1. BRUCE – POSTSCRIPT

        I don’t know whether you picked up the Dan-like link between two of my idols? Marlon bought Movita from Jack Doyle the Irish boxer who had tried to pursue a singing career as he wanted to sing like John McCormack, my favourite tenor about whom the John of this site and I have had – for once! – pleasant exchanges. Marlon is supposed to have paid Doyle $5000 and a bottle of whiskey to let go of Movita. I wonder what Bud would have paid for Myrna Loy !!

        Reply

        1. Hey Bob…..very cool. Dan is the man. John McCormack….the bridge for peace talks for your and John. But Loy is priceless….lol.

          Reply

      2. Tuna Fish 3. Glad you enjoyed the video. I also found it interesting. With the Tuna Fish code being my favorite story.

        Reply

  5. 1 STEVE I watched the Discovering Mr Mumbles documentary on TV last night and in it famous film historian and former leading film critic of the English newspaper The Guardian Derek Malcolm spoke highly of Mr M and that reminded me of an article that Malcolm once wrote in which he explained the mistake that guys like you seem to have made. Malcolm said that unusual for a major star in the early 1950s Hollywood the young Mr M played inarticulate ‘working-class’-type “street” characters like Stanley Kowalski, Terry Malloy and Johnny in the Wild One.

    2 However brought up in the Cary Grant/Larry Olivier style of “middle class” vocal delivery people [like Steve Lensman] expected Mr M to always speak like that and when he didn’t they confused themselves into thinking that he “mumbled” whereas Stanley or Terry would never have spoken like Olivier/Grant and certainly Zapata would not have done so

    3 When Mr M played the totally different Mark Antony and spoke perfect Shakespearean English in his Oscar nominate role in Julius Caesar and carried on the good work in films like Mutiny on the Bounty, The Ugly American, Burn and Superman they [ie the Lensmans] couldn’t accept what was happening and developed a mental block against it and so the “mumbling” myth was born and persists today. People like Spencer Tracy who felt threatened by Brando paid lip service to the myth of an inarticulate lout but among the other great stars of the time Grant to be fair refused to go along with it as did Bogie

    4 Certain other wise professionals too were never fooled by the myth:

    “He gave us our freedom.” – Jack Nicholson
    “When I first saw him I knew I was watching acting genius.” – Lord Olivier
    “There was before Brando and now there is after Brando HE is the marker.” Martin Scorsese

    Reply

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