With a worldwide gross of over USD 600 million, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is now the highest-grossing of all World War 2 movies ever made. It surpassed the director’s own film, Dunkirk (2017), which earned USD 512 million worldwide. Nolan is now the only director with two movies, among the 14 biggest earners whose theme is World War 2.
The War, which took place from 1939 to 1945, is a major cinematic genre that is not restricted to Hollywood alone. This is because World War 2 affected almost every country in every continent. Only 14 countries, including Sweden, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal and Ireland, maintained official neutrality, but not all of them effectively adhered to it.
Due to the large-scale devastation and long-term impact the war had on the lives of millions of people the world over, any well-scripted story set during the conflict has continued to captivate moviegoers for decades. This is why World War 2, as a theme, includes some of the best movies ever made in cinematic history.
Christopher Nolan’s success with Oppenheimer is proof that the war genre maintains a very strong pull. Indeed, eight of the top 14 highest-grossing World War 2 movies by global revenue have won Academy Awards, with The English Patient (1996) leading the pack with nine wins, including Best Picture.
What are World War 2-related movies?
It is important to note that several movies may be related to World War 2 because of their setting, but where the war itself does not influence the progression of the story. These movies fall primarily in other genres that may or may not have anything to do with the war itself.
One of the biggest examples of such films is The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005), which earned USD 720 million at the box office. Based on the 1950 high fantasy novel of the same name by C. S. Lewis, the story follows four Pevensie children who enter a magical world through a hidden door. Even though it begins with an evacuation of the children during World War 2, it is not a war film as the characters and the story are far removed from the real world of the war.
Similarly, The Others (2001), a supernatural horror film starring Nicole Kidman has a connection to World War 2, but the war is not the subject of the story.
Thus, any list of the best World War 2 movies will include only those films the story is set during the war and the characters, too, are either part of it or directly impacted by it.
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The best World War 2 movies by worldwide box office revenue
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Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Robert Downey Jr., Emily Blunt, Matt Damon, Florence Pugh, Kenneth Branagh
Release date: 21 July 2023
IMDb rating: 8.6
Worldwide gross: USD 649,027,000
Synopsis: Physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer (Murphy) is given the charge of a top-secret project to create an atomic bomb during World War 2. His efforts culminated with the world’s first nuclear explosion on 16 July 1945.
Image credit: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda Sue Gordon – © Universal Pictures. All Rights Reserved./IMDb
Director: Christopher Nolan
Cast: Fionn Whitehead, Kenneth Branagh, Tom Glynn-Carney, Jack Lowden, Harry Styles, James D’Arcy, Barry Keoghan, Cillian Murphy, Mark Rylance, Tom Hardy
Release date: 21 July 2017
IMDb rating: 7.8
Worldwide gross: USD 512,390,011
Synopsis: Over 300,000 troops, comprising primarily British Commonwealth soldiers, are trapped on the beaches of Dunkirk in France in May 1940. As they face possible rout at the hands of the advancing German armed forces, a plan is hatched to evacuate all of them in time using every naval and civilian vessel available.
Image credit: Melinda Sue Gordon – © 2016 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Ratpac-Dune Entertainment LLC and Ratpac Entertainment, LLC/IMDb
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Edward Burns, Tom Sizemore, Barry Pepper, Giovanni Ribisi, Vin Diesel, Adam Goldberg, Jeremy Davies
Release date: 24 July 1998
IMDb rating: 8.6
Worldwide gross: USD 485,035,085
Synopsis: US Army Private James Ryan (Damon), who has lost three brothers in combat during World War 2, is trapped behind enemy lines after the Normandy landings. Captain John Miller (Hanks) must mount a daring mission to find and rescue him.
Image credit: © 1998 Paramount Pictures/IMDb
Director: Michael Bay
Cast: Ben Affleck, Kate Beckinsale, Josh Hartnett, Cuba Gooding Jr., Tom Sizemore, Jon Voight, Colm Feore, Alec Baldwin
Release date: 21 May 2001
IMDb rating: 6.2
Worldwide gross: USD 449,239,853
Synopsis: Rafe McCawley (Affleck), a US Army Air Corps (USAAC) pilot, is deployed in Europe and is presumed killed in action. Mourning his supposed death, his girlfriend, the nurse Evelyn (Beckinsale), and childhood friend, USAAC pilot Danny Walker (Hartnett), grow close. A tense reunion of the trio at Pearl Harbor is interrupted by the Japanese attack on 7 December 1941.
Image credit: © 2001 – Buena Vista Pictures/IMDb
Director: Tom Hooper
Cast: Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, Helena Bonham Carter
Release date: 25 December 2010
IMDb rating: 8.0
Worldwide gross: USD 430,061,213
Synopsis: Prince Albert (Firth), who has a speech impediment, is forced to ascend the throne as the British monarch King George VI, following his brother’s abdication. To help her husband, Elizabeth (Carter) hires Australian actor and speech therapist Lionel Logue (Rush), who must prepare the monarch to speak properly so that he can address the nation after the United Kingdom declares war on Germany in 1939.
Image credit: © 2010 The Weinstein Company/IMDb
Director: Joe Johnston
Cast: Chris Evans, Hayley Atwell, Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee Jones, Hugo Weaving, Sebastian Stan, Dominic Cooper
Release date: 22 July 2011
IMDb rating: 6.9
Worldwide gross: USD 370,569,776
Synopsis: A frail Steve Rogers (Evans), who is rejected from the US military, volunteers for the ‘Super-Soldier’ project. It transforms him into a well-built and exceptionally strong superhero known as Captain America. With the help of his friend Bucky Barnes (Stan) and his love Peggy Carter (Atwell), Rogers must stop a Nazi-backed terrorist organisation HYDRA from getting what they want.
Image credit: © 2011 – Paramount Pictures/IMDb
Director: Steven Spielberg
Cast: Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes, Caroline Goodall, Jonathan Sagall
Release date: 4 February 1994
IMDb rating: 9.0
Worldwide gross: USD 322,197,130
Synopsis: German industrialist and Nazi party member Oskar Schindler initially employs Jewish workers in his factory in occupied Poland for business reasons. But after witnessing the horror committed on the Jews by the Nazis, he decides to protect the lives of over a thousand Jewish workers by keeping them in his factory.
Image credit: Universal Pictures – © 1993/IMDb
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Cast: Brad Pitt, Christoph Waltz, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, Daniel Brühl, Til Schweiger, Mélanie Laurent
Release date: 21 April 2009
IMDb rating: 8.3
Worldwide gross: USD 316,802,281
Synopsis: Lt. Aldo Raine (Pitt) assembles a team of Jewish soldiers during World War 2 to kill top Nazi leaders with the help of German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Kruger) and a theatre owner named Shosanna Dreyfus (Laurent). But in their way is the sadistic Nazi SS colonel Hans Landa (Waltz).
Image credit: IMDb
Director: Anthony Minghella
Cast: Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binoche, Kristin Scott Thomas, Naveen Andrews, Willem Dafoe
Release date: 6 December 1996
IMDb rating: 7.4
Worldwide gross: USD 231,710,008
Synopsis: Hana (Binoche), a nurse in an Italian monastery, tends to a badly burned man named Laszlo de Almasy (Fiennes) towards the closing days of World War 2. Flashbacks reveal the man’s relationship with a married Englishwoman (Scott Thomas) as well as Hana’s own life.
Image credit: © 1996 – Miramax/IMDb
Director: Roberto Benigni
Cast: Roberto Benigni, Nicoletta Braschi, Giorgio Cantarini
Release date: 20 December 1997
IMDb rating: 8.6
Worldwide gross: USD 229,375,361
Synopsis: Guido Orefice (Benigni), a Jewish-Italian waiter, is taken to a concentration camp with his son Giosue (Cantarini). To protect his little boy from being harmed by the Nazis and to hide the true nature of the concentration camp, Guido convinces the innocent Giosue that everyone is just playing a game to win a prize.
Image credit: IMDb
Director: Morten Tyldum
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Matthew Goode, Rory Kinnear, Charles Dance, Mark Strong
Release date: 25 December 2014
IMDb rating: 8.0
Worldwide gross: USD 227,328,585
Synopsis: English mathematician Alan Turing is part of the newly created British intelligence agency MI6. He is given the task of cracking the German Enigma code during World War 2, which he does successfully. But just a few years after the end of the war, a secret about his private life leads to his fall from grace in the eyes of a narrow-minded society.
Image credit: IMDb
Director: Baz Luhrmann
Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, David Wenham, David Gulpilil, Brandon Walters
Release date: 26 November 2008
IMDb rating: 6.6
Worldwide gross: USD 215,080,810
Synopsis: An Englishwoman Lady Sarah Ashley (Kidman) arrives in Australia just before World War 2, after inheriting a massive cattle ranch. She joins hands with a local known as the Drover (Jackman) to transport the cattle across miles of harsh terrain to Darwin. But by then, Japanese bombers had started hitting the city.
Image credit: IMDb
Director: David Ayer
Cast: Brad Pitt, Shia LaBeouf, Logan Lerman, Michael Peña, Jon Bernthal
Release date: 17 October 2014
IMDb rating: 7.6
Worldwide gross: USD 210,315,681
Synopsis: Though Allied forces have an upper hand in April 1945, Don “Wardaddy” Collier (Pitt) leads his Sherman tank and five-man crew on a mission behind enemy lines outnumbered and outgunned.
Image credit: © 2014 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved. **ALL IMAGES ARE PROPERTY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC. FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY./IMDb
Director: Bryan Singer
Cast: Tom Cruise, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy, Carice van Houten, Terence Stamp, Tom Wilkinson, David Bamber
Release date: 25 December 2008
IMDb rating: 7.1
Worldwide gross: USD 203,932,174
Synopsis: Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise), a decorated German war hero, joins a group of high-ranking men who are plotting the assassination of Adolf Hitler (Bamber). They find their opportunity on 20 July 1944, with von Stauffenberg given the crucial task.
Image credit: © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. All Rights Reserved.
(All figures according to The Numbers as on 14 August 2023.)
(Hero image: Giles Keyte – © 2014 CTMG, Inc. All Rights Reserved. **ALL IMAGES ARE PROPERTY OF SONY PICTURES ENTERTAINMENT INC. FOR PROMOTIONAL USE ONLY./IMDb; Featured image: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pic/Melinda Sue Gordon – © Universal Pictures. All Rights Reserved./IMDb)
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
– Which is the highest-grossing World War 2 movie?
The highest-grossing World War 2 movie is Oppenheimer (2003).
– Which is the highest-rated World War 2 movie according to IMDb?
The highest-rated World War 2 movie according to IMDb is Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993).
