Top 100 Musicals

Sittin' on top of rankings is Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain
Sittin’ on top of rankings is Gene Kelly’s Singin’ In The Rain when looking at critic and audience rankings

Want to know the best Top 100 Musicals movies?  How about the worst Top 100 Musicals movies?  Curious about Top 100 Musicals box office grosses or which Top 100 Musicals movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Top 100 Musicals movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information…and alot more.

Over the years we have received many requests to do UMR pages on genres.  Besides doing a Sports movie page we have pretty much ignored those requests.  We ignored those requests because we could not figure out a way to put together a page on a whole genre. Recently we stumbled across a book called Musicals by Daniel Cohen.  In that book Cohen looked at the best of the best musicals from the 1920s to the mid 1980s.  At the end of the book was a filmography of all the movies in his book.  That seemed like a great starting point for us to finally do a UMR page on musicals. Here are rules we used when putting together this page.

(1) If Cohen listed the movie in his book…the movie made the page. (2) Although we are not really huge musical movie fans….a few of the musicals we actually like….did not make his book.  So we added our favorite musicals like Paint Your Wagon (Clint singing…. how did that not make the book?) and The Rocky Horror Picture show.  (3) Then we included movie musicals made after Cohen’s book was published.  (4) We did not include Biopics.  Yes movies like The Buddy Holly Story, Coal Miner’s Daughter and La Bamba have lots of music but almost all of it occurs on a stage or in a studio.  (5) We also did not include album movies like Purple Rain and Pink Floyd’s The Wall or most of the Disney animated classics….with the exception of Beauty and The Beast which was on every Best Musical Movie list we saw.  (6) In the end we actually ended up with way more than 100 movies….279 to be precise.  So since we researched them….we figured we would include them.  (7) Can’t find a musical on the table?  If it was before 1984….it is not our fault….you have to blame Daniel Cohen.  If the movie is made after 1984….then we will take the blame.  BUT….leave a comment detailing the missing movie…..and we will include it.  Enjoy!

Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire are well represented in this collection of Top 100 Musicals….13 Rogers movies made the list and 27 Astaire movies made the list.

Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movies by the stars of the movies
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by actual domestic box office grosses
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals movies by adjusted worldwide box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals 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 Top 100 Musicals movie received.
  • Sort Top 100 Musicals 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.
  • Use the search and sort button to make this table very interactive.

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Top 100 Musicals Table

  1. 194 Top 100 Musicals movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark.  That is a percentage of 69.53% of his movies listed. The Sound of Music (1965) was the biggest box office hit.
  2. Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  224 of Top 100 Musicals’s movies are rated as good movies…or 80.28% of his movies.  Singin’ in the Rain (1952) is the highest rated movie while At Long Last Love (1975) is lowest rated movie.
  3. 168 Top 100 Musicals movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 60.21% of his movies.
  4. 66 Top 100 Musicals movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 23.65% of his movies.
  5. An average Ultimate Movie Ranking (UMR) Score is 40.00. 235 Top 100 Musicals movie scored higher that average….or 84.22% of his movies. West Side Story (1961) got the the highest UMR Score while At Long Last Love (1975) got the lowest UMR Score.
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30
Julie Andrews has 3 of the best reviewed musicals in the Top 30

Possibly Interesting Facts About Top 100 Musicals

1. The combined adjusted domestic box office gross for these 279 movies is $48.67 BILLION!

2. The 279 movies on this table received 573 Oscar® nominations.

3. The 279 movies on this table won 146 Oscars®.

4. 34 of these movies received Best Picture Oscar® nominations

5. 8 of these movies won the Best Picture Oscar®.

6.  The Great Ziegfeld (1936), An American in Paris (1951), Gigi (1958), West Side Story (1961), My Fair Lady (1964), The Sound of Music (1965), Oliver! (1968) and Chicago (2002) are the 8 Best Picture Oscar® winners.

 

Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences.  Golden Globes® are the registered trademark and service mark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.  Emmy® is a registered trademark.

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85 thoughts on “Top 100 Musicals”

  1. Love the list and data however, I think I went over the list carefully without finding “Sweethearts”, the MGM film from 1938 and one of the studio’s top money making films. In addition, it was MGM’s first full-length film in three-strip Technicolor and won a Special Oscar for that. Did I miss it on the list?

    Reply

    1. Hey Paul….yep you missed it…it is sitting in 158th place….right behind 157th Gigi and right before 159th Till The Clouds Roll By. With this massive amount of movies on the table….the search box at the top of the table makes it real easy to find movies….that is how I found it. Sweethearts was indeed a massive hit….earning over a quarter of a billion (adjusted gross) in the United States alone….when you sort by box office results….Sweethearts jumps into the Top 60 of all of these musicals. Thanks for the visit and the nice words about our musical page.

      Reply

      1. Sincere thanks for your guidance and tip on finding a title….I did try it and voila! However, I also checked on another title and was surprised it wasn’t there. “The Firefly” (MGM -1937) with Jeanette MacDonald and Allan Jones was listed as one of the top 16 moneymaking films of the year back in 1938 in one of the trade papers. MGM files show it as having been profitable upon its release too.

        Reply

        1. Hey Paul….you were correct… The Firefly was not on the list….but it is now….coming in at #177 according to critics and audiences….coming in at 120th when looking at box office totals and coming in 143rd when looking at my UMR Ranking Score. Since writing this musical page we have done a Jeanette MacDonald page you might like…it includes lots of worldwide box office grosses as well. https://www.ultimatemovierankings.com/jeanette-macdonald-movies/

          Reply

  2. I was looking at the Natalie Wood page as well as the best picture and 100 musical pages and I noticed that each adjusted B.O. Gross differs which is correct ? Does this site has a built-in Adjusted inflation calculation according to domestic B.O. take?

    Reply

    1. Hey Kevin…good catch….the gross on the Musical page was too high…..it has been adjusted back….currently West Side Story is the 71st biggest hit when looking at adjusted box office grosses. The UMR Score is diffent because West Side Story won the Oscar for Best Picture while Wood was only nominated for an Oscar. Our database does the calculation automatically… but sadly we have not made the site dynamic….so until I manually switch the number…it only shows up in the database and not the webstie. That is one of our goals…to get this to be a dynamic website….thanks the vist and the comment.

      Reply

  4. TOP 100?

    According to WHOM

    Kind of a subjective topic, I’d say.

    And as put forth, there have been FAR more than 100 musicals made, and I doubt that too many here HAVE seen all of them, and as tastes do vary, agreement on the “top” 100 would be severely limited and hard to determine.

    Reply

    1. Hey Sepiatone……According to WHOM? The whom would be anybody that has rated, reviewed or written about a musical. Most of the movies came from film historian author Daniel Cohen. Cohen has written some of the most respected books on movie musicals…not to mention over 80 other books on movies.

      The rating % shown in the page comes from…Video Hound reviews, Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, Roger Ebert, Metacritic, Leonard Maltin Classic Film Guide and assortment of Top Musical Lists. My program jams all the numbers into one place and spits out an overall score of 0-100. Based on all of those sources….Singin’ In The Rain, Mary Poppins, Cabaret, The Wizard of Oz and Top Hat have the Top 5.

      The best part of my page is each movie listed has its actual box office gross, its adjusted box office gross and its Oscar nominations and Oscars wins. When looking at box office.. The Sound of Music, Mary Poppins, South of The Pacific, This Is The Army and Grease are the Top 5. If you look at the Top 5 according to Oscar wins….you get West Side Story, My Fair Lady and tie for 3rd on with Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and The King And I.

      Ultimately the list means nothing…..but if you are a fan of musicals….I guarantee you will find lots of interesting stuff on the page.

      Reply

  5. How about: LUCKY BOY 1929 – “Lucky Boy is a 1929 American musical drama film starring George Jessel. The film was mainly a Silent film, with synchronized music and sound effects, as well as some talking sequences.” from Wikipedia
    Description is not unlike Jolson’s JAZZ SINGER or the 1929 adaptation of SHOWBOAT

    Other Lawrence Tibbett musicals that may or may not be on the list:

    ROGUE SONG 1930 –

    PARISIAN BELLE 1930 –

    THE CUBAN LOVE SONG 1930 –

    THE PRODIGAL 1931 –

    METROPOLITAN 1935 –

    UNDER YOUR SPELL 1936 –

    Reply

    1. Hey infinite1…..I was only able to find all the required information on one of the movies you listed. The Rogue Song….just missed cracking the Top 100…..as it sits in 109th place. Sadly box office information for the 1920s and 1930s is very hard to find. But I have listed your other 6 in my database….and if my internet searches find any information on them…I will add them to the page.

      Reply

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