10 Highest-Grossing Stanley Kubrick Movies

Stanley Kubrick only made 13 feature films during his directing career, but most are held up today as classics, and his influence on cinema as a whole is undeniable. He was unafraid to take his time with projects, particularly in the last few decades of his life, as those 13 films all came out within a span of 47 years. Kubrick never seemed keen on making mass-appeal movies or blockbusters, but nevertheless, most of his releases proved successful at the box office.

What follows are the 10 highest-grossing movies from his filmography, essentially omitting his first three movies (Fear and Desire, Killer’s Kiss, and The Killing) by default, as it’s hard to find box office data for those. Similarly, his earlier movies don’t have as much data about box office earnings as his later movies, and the totals are not adjusted for inflation, to be nice and transparent. Some numbers should be taken with grains of salt, but as succinctly and simply as possible, here are Stanley Kubrick’s top 10 earners, starting with the decent hauls and ending with the big hitters.

10 ‘Paths of Glory’ (1957)

Box Office: $1.2 million

Stanley Kubrick’s first great movie (and one of the best of the 1950s overall), Paths of Glory, is also the earliest film of his to have box office information… sort of. It suggests such a metric wasn’t as much of a concern in 1957, as there are differing estimates as to how much money this powerful anti-war film made, but a 1959 issue of Variety suggests that it earned $1.2 million during its initial theatrical run.

Considering the budget was $900,000, it did at least make more money than it purportedly cost, but everything seems close to guesswork when you go this far back in time; perhaps troublingly so. What might ultimately be most important is that even if Paths of Glory didn’t set the box office on fire during its time, it’s since been recognized as a remarkable and essential World War I movie, and a film that still holds a tremendous amount of power to this day.

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9 ‘Lolita’ (1962)

Box Office: $9.2 million

Sometimes, controversy sells, and those behind the marketing for Lolita likely knew this, given the film’s tagline was: “How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?” It didn’t become an all-time high-grosser by any means, but $9 million back in the early 1960s was a decent haul, especially because the budget of the film was estimated at being approximately $2 million.

Lolita was based on the 1955 novel of the same name by Vladimir Nabokov, and revolves around a disturbed middle-aged man who becomes infatuated with a teenage girl… in essence, it’s the kind of thing that still proves unsettling when watched today, even with numerous things being implied rather than explicit. Lolita’s a challenging film but rewarding film with great performances from the likes of Peter Sellers and James Mason, and would only rank low within Kubrick’s filmography because the rest of his work was so great.

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8 ‘Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964)

Box Office: $9.2 million

Satirical movies rarely get better than Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which makes the idea of the world ending surprisingly funny in a typically dark way (per Stanley Kubrick’s seeming sense of humor). Things kick off pretty quickly, what with tensions escalating between the United States and the Soviet Union, and numerous characters caught in the crossfire, all trying to de-escalate things before nuclear war destroys humanity.

It earned approximately the same as Lolita had two years earlier, and was similarly budgeted, making it another early success within Kubrick’s career. Still, perhaps like Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove is the kind of film that’s grown more acclaimed as the years (and eventually decades) wore on, given it’s now widely held up as an essential war/dark comedy movie.

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7 ‘Spartacus’ (1960)

Box Office: $17 million

Even if Spartacus might not carry the sorts of trademarks and stylistic touches one associates with Stanley Kubrick, the fact remains that it still delivers an engaging (and epic) story alongside some impressive action. The titular character is a slave who ends up leading a rebellion against the Roman Republic during the 1st century BC, with events and characters depicted largely being based on historical fact.

Spartacus was the kind of big movie that needed to find a great deal of success at the box office to be considered profitable, and thankfully it was, with approximate earnings being even higher than $17 million if various re-releases are taken into account. It might not have achieved the same numbers that other epics like Gone with the Wind and Ben-Hur did, though it was still successful, and remains worth watching to this day, even if it feels quite different from other Kubrick films.

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6 ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975)

Box Office: $31.5 million

Another Stanley Kubrick epic that manages to give Spartacus a run for its money scale-wise, Barry Lyndon is one of the filmmaker’s most ambitious films, and perhaps one of his best (or, at the very least, most underrated). It might not be a film that has permeated pop culture as much as Kubrick’s best-known works, but it was still a moderate box office success, earning almost three times its budget ($31.5 million).

Barry Lyndon runs for just over three hours, telling a story that spans numerous decades and shows how an Anglo-Irish man named Redmond Barry reinvents himself in an attempt to climb the social ladder in England during the late 1700s, renaming himself Barry Lyndon. It’s a beautiful-looking film shot on a huge scale, and proves to be one of Kubrick’s most rewarding for those who like to rewatch and/or analyze movies.

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5 ‘The Shining’ (1980)

Box Office: $47.3 million

Boasting unsettling cinematography, featuring an eerie score, and containing one of Jack Nicholson’s most committed performances, The Shining is an absolute classic as far as supernatural thriller/horror movies go. Those who tend to find psychological horror scarier will also find that in spades here; it really is the best of both worlds, depicting ghostly horrors and the intense unraveling of its main character’s mind.

As one of Kubrick’s later movies (his third-last overall), The Shining had a decently large budget for its time at approximately $19 million, but thankfully made more than double that back at the box office with a total of $47 million earned. And, once again, given it’s a film that’s stuck firmly within pop culture at large, it’s very likely to have earned considerably more money than just that, what with physical media sales and any kind of licensing earnings in the age of streaming.

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4 ‘A Clockwork Orange’ (1971)

Box Office: $114 million

Though A Clockwork Orange is one of the best movies released during the 1970s, it can still feel a little surprising to discover just how much money it made at the box office. It’s a disturbing and intense film that still proves shocking today, and yet moviegoers in the early ‘70s seemed to respond to it rather well. It might’ve been some level of controversy selling it, or maybe the excellent and eye-catching poster had something to do with it.

Of course, it could also be the case that people heard A Clockwork Orange was as excellent as it was provocative, and wanted to check out this sci-fi/crime/darkly satirical film for themselves. Considering its budget was estimated at just $1.3 million, the fact it ended up making well over $100 million means its profitability was undeniably impressive, even if several other Kubrick films technically earned a higher number of dollars.

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Box Office: $120 million

For his penultimate film, Stanley Kubrick made something that’s now considered one of the greatest war movies of all time: Full Metal Jacket. Memorably split into two halves, Full Metal Jacket takes an extensive look at the dehumanizing nature of military boot camp before following a handful of newly trained soldiers overseas, showing how the experience of fighting in the Vietnam War dehumanized such individuals even further.

It’s dark and psychologically horrifying stuff, but after spending more than 40 years making (mostly) great movies, Kubrick was well and truly a household name, and this was reflected by plenty of moviegoers showing up to see Full Metal Jacket. It was an expensive production budgeted at approximately $30 million, but easily made that back (and then some) with a worldwide box office haul of $120 million.

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2 ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ (1968)

Box Office: $146 million

One would expect science fiction, as a genre, to usually do better than gritty/violent Vietnam War movies at the box office, but it’s important to note that 2001: A Space Odyssey is no ordinary science fiction movie. Some would’ve come for the spectacle on offer and the special effects (that still look great to this day), but other aspects of the film – like the pacing and certain narrative ambiguities – could’ve proved frustrating to some.

Regardless, 2001: A Space Odyssey did extremely well, and it has a reputation for being the sort of movie that benefits immensely from being watched in a cinema, meaning re-releases have proven popular. $10.5 million was a pricey budget by the standards of the 1960s, but given that 2001: A Space Odyssey ended up earning approximately $146 million at the box office, the risk ended up paying off (and indeed paying the producers quite handsomely).

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1 ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ (1999)

Box Office: $162.1 million

A posthumous and controversial release (not to mention a surprise Christmas movie), Eyes Wide Shut’s existence as Stanley Kubrick’s final film meant that it would’ve earned money regardless of quality. Kubrick passing away quite suddenly at the age of 70 shortly after finishing the film felt like a profound loss for the medium as a whole, and curiosity was naturally high about what his final cinematic effort involved.

Then, the fact that Eyes Wide Shut starred one of Hollywood’s most famous couples at the time – Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman – playing a married couple going through a rocky patch (to say the least) only added to the intrigue. Though some would’ve been baffled by what they ended up seeing, the hype and bittersweet knowledge that this was the last Kubrick film people would ever see meant that Eyes Wide Shut was hugely successful, earning $162 million and being the biggest box office hit of Kubrick’s career.

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