If you’ve heard of Billy Jack, you likely know it was a huge success. But even people inside the industry don’t know exactly how big it was (HINT: it was WAY bigger than you ever thought).
Two websites provide some perspective: BoxOfficeReport.com and a more obscure MROB.com.
BoxOfficeReport.com correctly pegs the initial release of Billy Jack at $32,500,000, beating every other film that year - The French Connection, Summer of ’42, Dirty Harry, Clockwork Orange - except for Fiddler on the Roof. But the numbers for the re-release during 1972-73 were even more stunning: $60,000,000 (I’ll post this info next week), but these numbers didn’t get captured through the normal theater ticket sales mechanism so they only occasionally show up on box office totals. By the end of 1973 Billy Jack grossed a mind-numbing $92,500,000, bigger than any film in history to that point in time.
MROB.com takes a more analytical approach and uses a variety of sources to extract the number of tickets each film would have sold. On this list Billy Jack comes in at #65 of all time selling 58,000,000 tickets, and Trial of Billy Jack at #123 selling 47,000,000. Take a look at this list carefully, but be prepared: you’re going to be stunned to the caliber of films Billy Jack bested: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Toy Story, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Men In Black, The Transformers, Toy Story 3, Back to the Future, and Rocky… to name a lot. You’re going to be amazed!
Thanks to all of you that made Billy Jack and Trial of Billy Jack such phenomenal successes!
