Top Grossing Movies of 1939

One of my dad's favorite movies was Gunga Din. Gunga Din starred one of my favorite actors of all-time...Cary Grant. Gunga Din was the 5th biggest box office hit of 1939.
One of the Top Grossing Movies of 1939 was Gunga Din starring Cary Grant.

This movie page looks at The Top Grossing Movies of 1939.  1939 is considered by many people to be the greatest year ever for movies.  So you would figure finding box office information on the greatest year in movie history would be pretty easy to find.  That however is simply not true!  The box office information that is out there for 1939 movies…..is sorry to say …..pretty damn weak!

Many sources list Gone With The Wind as the top grosser and list between 5 and 10 movies in a tie for 2nd place (like that happened). Others list the top grossing movies but do not included any figures (looking at you Wikipedia and Variety) to back up their rankings. There are many Top Ten 1939 box office hit lists out there…. but with the exception of Gone With The Wind as the number one movie grosser they all list different movies in different order.  For somebody looking for box office information on 1939 it is very very frustrating.  Over the years, we have researched and collected information on over 20,000 movies.  So we figured we would show all the 1939 movies in our database.

To make this list a movie had to be made in 1939.  Obviously many movies (Pygmalion and Angels Have Dirty Faces) made in 1938 earned box office dollars in 1939.  On the other side many movies made in 1939 made money in 1940 and later.  Gone With The Wind actually earned very little box office dollars 1939 but broke the bank in 1940 and many other years during its many re-releases.

This page will looks at over 190 Top Grossing Movies of 1939.  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.

John Wayne in Stagecoach. Stagecoach was Wayne's big break. Stagecoach was his first of many box office hits.
John Wayne in Stagecoach. Stagecoach was Wayne’s big break. Stagecoach was his first of many box office hits.

Our UMR Top 50 of 1939

Top Grossing Movies of 1939 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 Grossing Movies of 1939 by the stars or in some cases the director of the movie.  If you want to see the 5 James Stewart movies on the table…just type in his name in the search box and up they will come
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by domestic actual box office grosses
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by domestic adjusted box office grosses using current movie ticket cost.
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 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 Grossing Movies of 1939 received.
  • Sort Top Grossing Movies of 1939 by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • If there is link in the co-star column….that link takes you to our UMR page for that performer

one With The Wind is easily the most famous movie of 1939...but did you know it opened in theaters in late December of 1939? So the most successful movie of all-time actually earned very little box office dollars in 1939.
Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh in 1939’s Gone With The Wind

My Main Sources

Source 1: Eddie Mannix MGM Ledgers

Source 2: C.J. Tevlin RKO Ledgers

Source 3: Variety Magazine – January 3rd 1940

Source 4: Year In Review Variety Editions – 1941,1942,1947,1954,1961,1968,1971,1974

Source 5: Grand Design: Hollywood As A Modern Business Enterprise 1930-1939 by Tino Balio

Source 6:  Wikipedia – 1939 in film

Source 7:  IMDb.com

Source 8:  “Revenue sharing and the coming of sound” by H. Mark Glancy

Source 9:  Professor Steve Lensman  Film Department Heston University.

Source 10:  Hundreds of autobiographies and biographies of star performers.  Sadly most of the time a book will say….”the movie did well at the box office or the movie did not perform as well as they were hoping”…those comments are no help at all…..but every once in awhile a book will give specific box office information.

How the Box Office Numbers were Calculated 

Sadly in 1939….BoxOfficeMojo was not around to keep track of box office earnings. Back then earnings seem to be a secret and a secret that needed to be safely locked up.  When studios did report box office stats they used “box office rentals”.  Box office rentals were the amount of money the studio got back from the theaters.  It is NOT the box office gross.  I created a computer program that looked at box office rentals and known box office grosses in my database.  My program found over 2,000 movies that matched that criteria and came up with an average of 2.2.  Meaning that box office gross was 2.2 times greater than box office rentals.  It is not an exact calculation….but it is the multiplier I used to calculate the grosses.  For example:  Looking at my dad’s favorite movie, Gunga Din.  Gunga Din returned to RKO studies $2,012,000 million in box office rentals.  Using my multiplier of 2.2….I calculate that the box office gross was $4,430,000 million in 1939. 

If a big budget movie made $4.43 million today it would be considered a huge box office bomb (can you say The Adventures of Pluto Nash?).  To compare box office results from movies from different eras you have to use tickets sold as the common denominator.  Back in 1939 the average movie admission was .28 cents (Box Office Mojo says it is .23 cents…but I disagree with their number).  So you take the box office gross and divide it by average movie admission….in this case…$4.43 million divided by $.23 you get 15.8 million tickets sold in 1939. Now (have I lost you yet?) you take the average movie admission price today ($8.14) and multiply that by tickets sold.  15.8 * $8.14 = $128.61 million  So if Gunga Din was released this year it would earn about $128.61 million.  Gunga Din’s unadjusted box office total of 4.43 million would rank as the 153rd highest grossing film of 2014….right behind The Skelton Twins.  But if we look at Gunga Din’s adjusted box office total of $128.61 million…it would rank as the 23rd highest grossing movie of 2014….one spot ahead of Lucy.

The ones that got away.  There are so many more movies from 1939.  My Top Ten movies that I am still searching for their box office totals.  First Love, The Great Victor Herbert, The Man In The Iron Mask, Four Feathers, Thunder Afloat, 6,000 Enemies, Stand Up And Fight, and Yes, My Darling Daughter …..the seach continues.

My Yearly Review Pages

To see our adjusted worldwide box office grosses on over 70 1939 movies check out this page.

Worldwide Box Office Grosses – 1939

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36 thoughts on “Top Grossing Movies of 1939”

  1. Disappointing to see “Only Angels Have Wings” at no. 32. It should’ve been in the top 10 IMHO.

    Reply

    1. Only Angels Have Wings is one of my favorite Grant movies….but being in the Top 35 in 1939…..the greatest year in movie history is pretty darn good

      Reply

  2. Whoa this is impressive and fascinating. Hollywoods greatest year, so many greats but 1940 was pretty good too. 😉
    I’ve seen 35 of the 81 films you’ve listed here. Gone With the Wind easily number one but was it no.1 within those 12 months? I see you’ve detailed the re-releases and grosses, good work amigo.

    I would have expected Stagecoach to be higher up on the list, it was a big hit and made John Wayne a major star after appearing in dozens of B-westerns.
    It’s fascinating seeing how successful these classics in adjusted dollars.
    1959 next? 🙂

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve…..I am at 28 on this list…..I think our old buddy Flora would have liked this page.

      As for Gone With The Wind….is was the #1 grosser in 1940…..back then they did not release movies the same way they do now…..so I do not think they had a new #1 every week.

      I had the same thought about Stagecoach as you….I actually have 3 sources on that one….and they all have it’s box office rentals right around 1 million. I guess Stagecoach was like The Usual Suspects and The Shawshank Redemption…..more of a critical hit that found a following versus being a box office smash…..but compared to the limited returns the Wayne B western movies returned…this was a massive hit for the Duke…and a launching point for a ride that lasted for almost 40 years.

      As always thanks for commenting and visiting my latest page…have I mentioned that I miss Flora?

      Reply

      1. Hi, Bruce.

        In looking on your site index I found this yearly reviews and I just had to answer this page. 🙂

        I do love this page.

        It is a great example of why I am so much more familiar with movies made before I was born. Even the films I haven’t seen I know the title.

        I have seen 54 of these movies. The highest a ranking film I have not seen is The Rains Came. Otherwise I have seen the top 10

        Films I watch at least once a year if not more include Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz (the first non-animated film I saw), Gunga Din, The Women, Dodge City, anything with Garland and Rooney together, Another Thin Man etc.

        The one film I have not seen I will likely not seek out is Swanee River, as I have no interest in Al Jolson.

        Reply

        1. Hey Flora…..proof in the pudding….you were being talked about and being remembered fondly back then….glad you have returned. So a tally count many months later….Flora 54, Steve 35…me 28. I bet Steve’s tally might be slightly higher as I have added some more 1939 movies since I originally posted this page.

          The Rains Came is pretty good…though I think Tyrone Power is miscast in that one. It has some decent special effects….especially for a movie made in 1939. So far I have done 7 yearly reviews….2011-2015, 1939 and 1946…..I have often thought about doing some of the older years like this….if anything….it actually helps me when I am researching a classic performer for a new page.

          Your list of annual 1939 movies to re-watch is a pretty impressive list. We will forgive you if you have no interest in watching Swanee River. Thanks for your input…this page is now complete.

          Reply

    1. @Scott…..it can be very frustrating finding box office information from the 1930s hopefully this page will help out other movie fans….thanks for the visit and comment.

      Reply

  4. WOW WOW WOW Man, that is a lot of information about the money the films make. I STILL WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE ACTORS GET ON RERUNS – RESIDUALS – NOW THAT WOULD BE VERY INTERESTING AS WELL.

    Thanks again for another good one. YOU ARE THE BEST!

    Reply

    1. BERN1960…thanks for commenting. Yes indeed there are a ton of stats in this one. Sorry I do not know a whole lot about the subject you seek…if I ever stumble across that information….I will be sure to let you know.

      Reply

  5. Interesting stuff here. GWTW stuff is pretty impressive. A 4K version is out there? Did it make it to home entertainment?

    Reply

    1. Hey Thorton….not sure if the 4K Gone With The Wind made it to home video. Gone With The Wind is a cash cow that will not die. Thanks for checking out my latest.

      Reply

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