10 Highest-Grossing Ridley Scott Movies

Not all of Sir Ridley Scott‘s movies have been huge box office successes, but in a career that spans 50 years, he has had some of the biggest blockbusters in modern film. The great thing about all of Sir Scott’s commercially successful movies is that each one is also a terrific film that adds great depth to the history of moviemaking. The acclaimed filmmaker has directed 31 movies and grossed over $4.5 billion in total. Yes, that’s billions with a “B”!

You will find the well-known Scott entries like Gladiator and Black Hawk Down among the top 10 highest-grossing films of his career, but there are also a few entries that you may not have thought made as much dough as they did with the top spot being a sci-fi movie you might not expect. Here is a list of Ridley Scott’s top-earning movies that had the studio executives grinning while they lit up a cigar and poured themselves a good drink knowing the directorial reins were in very good hands.

10 ‘Black Hawk Down’ (2001)

$173 million worldwide

Inspired by the tragic true story of the failed United States Army Ranger special operation mission into Mogadishu, Somalia in 1993, Sir Ridley Scott’s most notable and successful war genre film comes in at number 10. The story of Operation Gothic Serpent during the Battle of Mogadishu is as harrowing as it is spectacular. Scott has not taken on the war genre very often, but Black Hawk Down is not only his best, but one of the best military cinema experiences ever made.

Black Hawk Down is one of the very rare war films that strikes a wonderful balance of character development with the harried, frenzied, and visceral vicissitudes of modern warfare. Josh Hartnett and Tom Sizemore are two soldiers who are tasked with saving as many lives as possible after their assassination attempt goes horribly awry. The realism and horror of a group of Rangers severely outnumbered by angry people and warlords in Somalia are both thrilling and hard to watch.

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9 ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ (2005)

$218 million worldwide

Starring an A-list ensemble including Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson, Eva Green, and Edward Norton, Kingdom of Heaven did very well at the box office despite not being one of Scott’s more well-known and highly touted movies. Bloom was coming off turns in both the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Pirates of the Caribbean saga, so he is no stranger to sweeping epics, and that’s exactly what Kingdom of Heaven is.

There have been many movies about the Crusades, but Scott’s version jumps off the screen. After killing a corrupt priest (Michael Sheen), Balian of Ibelin (Orlando Bloom), is still grieving for his wife and has been forced to flee his home. He finds his estranged father, Balian (Liam Neeson), and also shares a unique chemistry with a new love, Sibylla (Green). Scott proves that he can handle any historical era with this medieval gem, which has a splendid story interwoven with riveting action sequences.

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8 ‘Alien: Covenant’ (2017)

$241 million worldwide

With Alien: Covenant, Scott doubled down on reclaiming his beloved Xenomorph that he used to make a name for himself with Alien in 1979 and 2012’s Prometheus (another high-grossing entry). Alien: Covenant is set years after the crew of the Prometheus tried and failed to uncover the connection between humans and the mercurial race of Engineers. As we find out, the Engineers are not what we expected them to be and in Alien: Covenant, we discover what has happened on the same planet when a team of scientists search for an inhabitable new home for thousands of colonists who are in cryostasis.

The real draw in Covenant is the encore performance of Michael Fassbender as the rogue AI droid named David. Having been left alone on a foreign planet for years after the Prometheus failure, David has gone a bit bonkers. He has spent his time attempting to hybridize the Xenomorph with other species and has created a small army of alien bastards who are bloodthirsty and answer only to him. Covenant, while not at the level of its predecessor, is still an underrated gem of an Alien entry for Scott.

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7 ‘American Gangster’ (2007)

$270 million worldwide

It was a clash of titans at the height of their powers when Ridley Scott recruited both Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe for the leads in American Gangster. This entry is a bit of an outlier in that it is Scott doing a specific period piece set in the United States. You could argue that putting Washington and Crowe together at the height of their Hollywood influence would be enough to make a tidy purse, but Scott gives American Gangster his patented touch with measured dialogue and a mix of tight and wide shots.

It’s a crisply paced game of cat and mouse between two Hollywood stalwarts that drives this movie. Scott knows he’s going to get outstanding performances from his actors, so he needs to carefully draw a cinematic maze that both the audience and the leads walk through together. In what is a loosely based story, Denzel makes Lucas almost seem sympathetic as a man who comes from nothing to become the most powerful drug dealer in Harlem only to have Crowe’s character, Detective Richie Roberts, get a checkmate on the dashing but dastardly Lucas.

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6 ‘Exodus: Gods and Kings’ (2014)

$268 million worldwide

Admittedly, seeing this Scott film this high on the list is a bit of a surprise. Ridley’s movies are like pizza, even if they’re “bad,” they’re still good, and on several occasions, great. Always looking for a different period in history to dissect, Scott tackles the biblical story of Moses (Christian Bale) taking from the Book of Exodus as source material. Exodus: Gods and Kings retells how the great leader of the Jewish people wages war with the tyrannical Pharoah Ramses II (Joel Edgerton) as he and his people flee from Egypt.

Bale and Edgerton both take a bit of a leap and put their trust in Scott to tell the ancient story with aplomb and accuracy. While Scott doesn’t take directly from the Bible, his character development is powerful and consistent with everything we know and have read about both historical figures. Scott decides to spiff up the Old Testament story with a sleeker and shinier wardrobe but never strays from the important thrust.

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5 ‘Robin Hood’ (2010)

$322 million worldwide

Scott teamed up with Russel Crowe yet again for their adaptation of the storied thief who robs the rich to give to the poor. Robin Hood has had more iterations than we can remember in the last half-century, and there were high hopes for this one with a top-notch director and an A-list actor who he had proven to have undeniable chemistry with. While it managed to rake in almost a third of a billion dollars at the box office, it may not be the best collaboration between the two and is definitely not in a league with Gladiator.

Crowe does bring the most rugged version yet of Robin of Locksley to the big screen, and the law of “even mediocre Ridley Scott movies are still pretty good” still applies to his take on the classic tale. Even with the great Cate Blanchett in the role of Lady Marian and an affable Oscar Issac also shouldering the load as Prince John, another take on the noble thief has to have something very special about it to stand out from the rest. The acting is fantastic, but it sometimes feels like audiences have seen this story before (because they have).

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4 ‘Hannibal’ (2001)

$353 million worldwide

Sir Ridley Scott lured Sir Anthony Hopkins back to reprise his role as the erudite but deranged cannibal, Dr. Hannibal Lecter in Hannibal. Much was expected of the new iteration of the Oscar-winning film The Silence of the Lambs, and while the film wasn’t as critically lauded as the original, the draw of Hopkins as the diabolical psychopath was enough to land as one of Scott’s most commercially successful films. Hopkins delivers the goods, but over a decade removed from the original and without the dynamic chemistry he shared with co-star Jodie Foster as Clarice Starling, it was almost a no-win situation.

Hannibal is an example of how confident Scott is as a director. To take on a sequel that had set the bar so incredibly high would be enough to scare most filmmakers away, but he welcomed the almost quixotic challenge of living up to the Oscar-winning Jonathan Demme movie. Hopkins and Julianne Moore are some serious talents, but how can you top a movie that won the “big four” Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Actress in 1990?

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3 ‘Prometheus’ (2012)

$403 million worldwide

Prometheus was a critical movie for fans of Ridley Scott’s prowess as a director of the Sci-fi genre. After several lackluster Alien sequels and crossovers – aside from the splendid 1986 follow-up Aliens – he reclaimed his franchise with one of the most thought-provoking and beautifully shot films of the 21st century. With an A-list ensemble cast that includes Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Idris Elba, and Danny McBride, the ambitious film about the search for answers to the creation of humankind is a brilliant epic and is still underrated.

Rapace delivers her usual knockout performance as Dr. Elizabeth Shaw, a scientist who is leading a team of researchers on what they believe may reveal an explanation of the creation of the human race. She brings her solid brand of physicality to the lead, while huge stars like Fassbender, Theron, and Elba buttress a well-rounded cast in a most welcome return to blissful Sci-fi form for Scott and the Alien franchise.

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2 ‘Gladiator’ (2000)

$503 million worldwide

After making a name for himself in the Sci-fi genre, Scott turned around and delivered a home run with his Oscar-winning tour de force Gladiator. Maximus Decimus Meridius’s (Russell Crowe) hero’s journey is one for the ages and the first of several films in which he would collaborate with the Aussie star. The breadth and pure scope of Scott’s foray into historical fiction is awesome to behold and will always be regarded as one of his best and most remembered accomplishments.

This story is the ultimate good versus evil with both sides executed to complete perfection. Maximus’s fall and rise again from slavery to topple the Roman ruling class is arguably the greatest action film of the century if not longer. Not to be overlooked is the deliciously twisted performance of Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus, the overlooked black sheep of the Roman royal family who will do whatever it takes to put Maximus in his place and rule Rome with an iron fist.

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1 ‘The Martian’ (2015)

$630 million worldwide

It is fitting that the number one highest-earning Ridley Scott film is a fantastic Sci-fi entry. The man who set the standard for thrilling movies in outer space has dedicated the better part of the last dozen years to reestablishing himself as the godfather of the genre. From 2012 to 2021, he made Prometheus, The Martian, Alien: Covenant, and episodes of Raised by Wolves, an acclaimed series that aired two seasons on HBOMAX from 2020-2021. The director takes “lost in space” to an edge-of-your-seat new level with 2015’s intrepid and smart movie about a man stranded on the Red Planet and is a well-deserved anchor for the number one spot.

Matt Damon has never been better as Mark Watney, a botanist who gets marooned on Mars after the rest of his crew barely escapes and believes he is dead. Left alone on a strange planet, Watney survives with a keen understanding of agriculture and science. Scott’s direction brings a perfect balance of Watney’s pure desperation and the measured urgency of the engineers on Earth who are trying to bring him home.

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