Want to know the best Francis Ford Coppola movies? How about the worst Francis Ford Coppola movies? Curious about Francis Ford Coppola’s box office grosses or which Francis Ford Coppola movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Francis Ford Coppola movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences and which got the worst reviews? Well you have come to the right place….because we have all of that information.
Francis Ford Coppola (1939-) is a 5 time Oscar® winning writer, director and producer. When looking at a list of great directors…Coppola was one of the few directors that we had not done a page on. So seeing that Coppola was on our request list (request by HInton66) we decided to make him our latest movie subject. Coppola has been directing movies for over 50 years. The Godfather trilogy are easily his most famous movies….but he made many other movies.
His IMDb page shows over 150 credits from 1962-2015. This page ranks 27 Francis Ford Coppola movies from Best to Worst in six different sortable columns of information. Television shows, shorts, video games and movies not released in North America and many of his movies that barely made a dent at the box office were not included in the rankings.
Francis Ford Coppola 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 Francis Ford Coppola movies by co-stars of his movies.
- Sort Francis Ford Coppola movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost (in millions)
- Sort Francis Ford Coppola movies by yearly domestic box office rank
- Sort Francis Ford Coppola movies how they were received by critics and audiences. 60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
- Sort by how many Oscar® nominations each Francis Ford Coppola movie received and how many Oscar® wins each Francis Ford Coppola movie won.
- Sort Francis Ford Coppola 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 page very interactive.
Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Francis Ford Coppolal Table
- Eight Francis Ford Coppola movies crossed the magical $100 million domestic gross mark. That is a percentage of 29.63% of his movies listed. The Godfather (1972) was his biggest box office hit.
- An average Francis Ford Coppola movie grosses $96.40 million in adjusted box office gross.
- Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter. 20 Francis Ford Coppola movies are rated as good movies…or 74.07% of his movies. The Godfather (1972) is his highest rated movie while Jack (1996) is his lowest rated movie.
- Fourteen Francis Ford Coppola movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 51.85% of his movies.
- Five Francis Ford Coppola movie won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 18.51% of his movies.
- An average Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 40.00. 13 Francis Ford Coppola movies scored higher that average….or 48.14% of his movies. The Godfather 2 (1974) got the the highest UMR Score while Tonight For Sure (1962) got the lowest UMR Score.
Possibly Interesting Facts About Francis Ford Coppola
1. George Francis Ford Coppola was born in 1939 in Detroit, Michigan.
2. Francis Ford Coppola has been nominated for 14 Oscars®….he was won 5 times. In 2011 he also received a Honorary Oscar®.
3. Francis Ford Coppola has been nominated for 11 Golden Globes….he has won 5 times.
4. Francis Ford Coppola has helped make seven movies that received a Best Picture Oscar® nomination: 1970’s Patton (he wrote screenplay) , 1972’s The Godfather, 1973’s American Graffiti (he produced the movie), 1974’s The Godfather Part 2, 1974’s The Conversation, 1979’s Apocalypse Now and 1990’s The Godfather Part 3.
5. Three Francis Ford Coppola movies won the Best Picture Oscar®: 1970’s Patton, 1972’s The Godfather and 1974’s The Godfather Part 2.
6. George Lucas said that he based the “Han Solo” character from the Star Wars trilogy on Francis Ford Coppola.
7. Francis Ford Coppola Oscar® family tree: His dad, Carmine Coppola was an Oscar® winning composer. His sister, Talia Shire, is a two time Oscar® nominated actress who starred in the Godfather and Rocky movies. His daughter, Sophia Coppola, is an Oscar® nominated director. His nephew, Nicolas Cage, is an Oscar® winning actor.
8. Francis Ford Coppola directed 12 different actors in Oscar®-nominated performances: Geraldine Page, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, James Caan, Robert Duvall, Robert De Niro, Michael V. Gazzo, Lee Strasberg, Talia Shire, Kathleen Turner, Andy Garcia and Martin Landau. Brando and De Niro won their Oscar® for their performances as Vito Corleone.
9. Francis Ford Coppola’s favorite films are: 1958’s Ashes and Diamonds, 1946’s The Best Years of Our Lives , 1951’s I Vitelloni, 1960’s The Bad Sleep Well, 1961’s Yojimbo, 1952’s Singin’ in the Rain, 1982’s The King of Comedy, 1980’s Raging Bull, 1960’s The Apartment and 1927’s Sunrise.
10. Check out Francis Ford Coppola‘s career compared to current and classic actors. Most 100 Million Dollar Movies of All-Time.
Academy Award® and Oscar® are the registered trademarks of the Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences. Golden Globe® is a registered trademark of the Hollywood Foreign Press.
For comments….all you need is a name and a comment….please ignore the rest.
STEVE
1 Such has been your influence on me that I thought of you immediately I read the following article in yesterday’s English Guardian newspaper.
2 It appars that although he obviously could not physically attend this reunion Mr Mumbles was still able to make his presence felt via his photograph overlooking the proceedings. And of course a picture can’t talk so it seems that all that poor diction we keep hearing about was really academic in the end!
“ AN OFFER THEY COULDN’T REFUSE: THE GODFATHER CAST REUNITE 45 YEARS ON
Stars get together in New York to swap stories about casting, drinking and even mooning during the making of the films.
Debilitating studio battles. One miraculously still cat. Mooning contests between James Caan and Marlon Brando. These were the memories shared, 45 years later, on the making of The Godfather in a rare reunion of the film’s cast and director Francis Ford Coppola in New York.
With the stage decorated to resemble the library of Brando’s Don Corleone, and a portrait of the actor hanging above, Coppola and cast members Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, Robert Duvall, James Caan, Diane Keaton and Talia Shire, gathered together once again on Saturday. The night at at Radio City Music Hall was organised by De Niro as the closing evening of his Tribeca Film Festival, which preceded the affair with a grand double feature of The Godfather, parts one and two. Both films are widely viewed as among the finest ever made.”
Thanks for the tip Bob, I’ve found the article at The Guardian’s online website, in their Culture section. There’s a cool photo of the cast reunited 45 years later which I sadly can’t link here. Even 86 year old Robert Duvall made the trip which was nice. Missing of course is the man who made the first Godfather film so iconic and successful, the old Don himself – Mr. Mumbles.
I read somewhere that The Godfather and it’s first sequel were the last genuinely great films Hollywood ever made, before Spielberg and Lucas successfully re-tuned the old Hollywood b-movies and serials into moneymaking blockbusters and changed cinema maybe forever.
Don Corleone: Tell me, do you spend time with your family?
Johnny Fontane: Sure I do.
Don Corleone: Good. Because a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man. You look terrible. I want you to eat, I want you to rest well. And a month from now this Hollywood big shot’s gonna give you what you want.
Johnny Fontane: Too late. They start shooting in a week.
Don Corleone: I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse. Okay? I want you to leave it all to me. Go on, go back to the party.
STEVE
1 Saw the photograph thanks. They certainly didn’t look the young whippersnappers they were when those two movies were made but nevertheless they appeared contented and even self-satisfied.
2 I agree with your comments about Spielberg/Lucas and in fact in an interview George boasted “We’ve out grossed Old Hollywood!” If you deduct from Sylvester Stallone’s grosses the figures for his massive franchises Rocky, Rambo and The Expendables he is left with only about a third of the adjusted total gross that Bruce has given him so it could be said that his status as a superstar rests heavily on those franchises. This has caused one film historian to opine that the future template for stardom will be comprised mainly of successful box-office franchises. Sometime you may think about doing a video of a montage of what you consider were Hollywood’s greatest films pre Spielberg/Lucas
3 You will of course be aware that Johnny Fontane is supposed to have been based on Sinatra with the Horse’s Head sequence representing how the Mafia got Frank the part in From Here to Eternity. Rumour has it that Frankie considered that he had received a double whammy from Mr M who had got the parts of Terry Malloy and Sky Masterson that Sinatra wanted back in the 1950s and then got to slap ‘Sinatra’ in The Godfather. As I think John too has mentioned previously the “offer he can’t refuse” line was first uttered by the Duke in one of his long ago B westerns, but it never caught on back then but now ranks after only Gone with the Wind’s “Frankly my dear—“ in a list of greatest movie lines of all time.
Very good stuff here…..thanks for sharing it Bob and Steve.
HI BRUCE
1 One historian said that in the 1960s Brando’s artistic status dropped and his box office receipts diminished but that he still maintained his stature as a high earnings actor. For example for Reflections in a Golden Eye he and Liz then at her peak [but not afterwards!] both got $750,000 – about $6 million in todays money – plus a % of the profits, of which there were unfortunately little or none.
2 However whilst his movies were not the consistent grossers that they were in the 1950s some historians [and Richard Harris] have claimed that the commercial failure of Marlon’s movies was exaggerated by the studios and the media as it was fashionable to kick Brando when he was down. For example it has been reported that MGM artificially magnified the cost of making the 1962 Mutiny by adding in all kinds of economic charges that the studio had not in reality incurred. One such high cost was apparently the purchase of the ship even though they didn’t in fact have to buy it as it was the one that they already possessed having used it in the 1935 Gable/Laughton movie.
3 The conclusions of the historians and Harris seem to be borne out by your own stats which trade in hard figures and not emotional considerations as your Brando table gives his 1960s movies an average adjusted domestic gross of over $70 million. Whilst that kind of figure was well below the average for say a standard Wayne or Gable movie it was considerably above what a lot of for example Nicolas Cage movies have made recently without too much of a fuss being made about the fact. Indeed your pages have demonstrated time and time again that a $70 million average is beyond some stars over the entirety of their careers, and last year a historical movie author claimed on the radio that most of Brando’s 1960s movies had in fact turned a profit.
4 Anyway Coppola made all those arguments academic for posterity and one historian said that after Godpop many of the Hollywood insiders who had hitherto “spat” on Brando were “now following him about with a tin cup” begging him to appear in their films. Brando admirers should therefore refer to Coppola as Saint Francis though it’s just a pity that Coppola hasn’t been able to do for his nephew lately what he did for Marlon.
PS Don’t you be greedy you did after all get to meet Richard Dreyfuss !
1 Probably most directors with The Godfather trilogy and Apocalypse Now in their CV would regard their posterity reputations as very secure even if nothing else succeeded. The latter is not the case here of course and in Possibly Interesting Facts above Coppola’s artistic achievements are described in detail. The two highest grossing movies worldwide in Steve Lensman’s Coppola stats video Godfather 1 and Apocalypse Now amassed globally almost $1.9 billion in adjusted 2015 dollars according to Steve, Lee’s Movies suggests that those two flicks earned a further small fortune in video and TV sales, Variety called Godpop 1 as Variety once insisted upon calling it “the blockbuster with brains” and the “Boy Wonder” of the early 1940s who made Citizen Kane publicly praised the brilliance of Apocalypse Now. This page and update are thus well merited. Good work Cogerson.
2 Francis’ Godfather films and Vietnam movie alone also either made or enhanced the careers of many performers , most becoming household names – Pacino, Caan, Duvall and Keaton Godfather 1, DeNiro Godfather 2, Andy Garcia Godfather 3 and Marty Sheen Apocalypse Now. It must also be remembered that Francis probably rescued from oblivion Marlon Brando’s career from going “down the tubes” as Marlon himself put it. As it was historians estimate that Brando earned 30 million in today’s dollars from Coppola’s Apocalypse Now which along with his massive Superman 1978 loot enabled him to partially retire from movies in 1980 and finance some of his off-screen pet projects [for example he reportedly marketed a few minor mechanical inventions of his own.]
3 Coppola is undoubtedly a larger than life character but he as he proclaimed publicly “I’ve always got money problems” and indeed the table above shows that only 10 of his movies made more than 70 million domestically in adjusted dollars. However whilst he was not overall as commercially successful as other “Movie Brats” [as Francis, Lucas, DePalma and Spielberg were nicknamed in the early 1970s] he stood shoulder to shoulder with them in the art of moviemaking. I remember once listening on the radio to a film historian who had met Coppola and who couldn’t believe his luck, “I had met the man who made The Godfather. The man who gave us Apocalypse Now.”
Hey Bob.
1. I figured this update…with two of Brando’s greatest movies…would catch your attention.
2. I agree Steve and my pages go well together.
3. Those are some hefty numbers for sure….I wish there was a way that allowed us to see how much a movie made away from theaters……I am sure studios do not want to share….but …at one point they did not want to share what they were doing in theaters….and now look at the interest in that subject.
4. If the VOD (Video on Demand) people had a weekly Top 20 list I would be checking it out….if only to see how Nicolas Cage’s career was doing….lol.
5. The Coppola/Brando team was good for both of them….but without a doubt…The Godfather made Brando superstar again. I think the 1960s knocked Brando from the superstar status….but he was still a star. Sorry if those are fighting words. 🙂
6. I would like to meet “the man who made The Godfather. The man who gave us Apocalypse Now.” too.
Good feedback as always.