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Ten Highest-Grossing Films About American Presidents

Mike Tyrkus
white house

In honor of President’s Day, we thought we might take a look at the ten highest-grossing movies ever made on the topic of American presidents. This list was constructed using domestic box office totals that have also been adjusted for inflation (according to data procured from Box Office Mojo and The Numbers). So, without further adieu, here are the ten highest-grossing films about American presidents.

 

10. Olympus Has Fallen (2013)

Original Domestic Gross: $98,927,592
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $111,460,849

Another one of those “Die Hard in …” movies that happened to be set in the White House. This one starred Gerard Butler as Mike Banning, a secret service agent who finds himself trapped along with the president (Aaron Eckhart) during a terrorist attack on the White House. As hinted earlier, it amounts to little more than an attempt to replicate Die Hard in the White House. But, despite failing miserably in living up to its inspiration, Olympus Has Fallen nevertheless did well enough to allow the series to eventually add another two films.

9. The American President (1995)

Original Domestic Gross: $60,022,813
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $126,094,243

Michael Douglas plays a widowed president in Rob Reiner’s romantic comedy, that was written by Aaron Sorkin. Here the president is caught in an election-year battle with his GOP opposition (played to the hilt by Richard Dreyfuss) as he tries to re-enter the dating game along with environmental lobbyist Sydney Ellen Wade (Annette Bening). The American President is an incredibly charming story that never fails to entertain even after repeated viewings.

8. Lee Daniels’ The Butler (2013)

Original Domestic Gross: $116,632,095
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $131,406,484

Lee Daniels’ The Butler is an epic story of a fictional White House butler Cecile Gaines (Forest Whitaker) who serves a total of eight presidents. Like, a powerful documentary, the film offers a look at the unfolding of the tumultuous events of the nation’s history from the perspective of those behind the scenes in the houses of power.

7. Dave (1993)

Original Domestic Gross: $63,270,710
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $139,990,265

Director Ivan Reitman’s comedy, Dave, tells the tale of an average “Joe” (Kevin Kline) who is tagged with replacing a recently deceased sitting president because he happens to look exactly like him. Of course this backfires as he turns out to not be the wanton political animal, but rather a down-to-earth everyman with his heart in the right place that is the president that the country always expects it will get with each election.

6. JFK (1993)

Original Domestic Gross: $70,405,498
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $154,038,545

Oliver Stone’s controversial conspiracy thriller covering the assassination of John F. Kennedy, simply titled JFK, is an interesting mix of fact and fiction that managed to not only capture the distrust many Americans feel with regards to the government, but it also predicted the importance of historical knowledge and simply not relying on “alternative facts” to recount history.

5. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)

Original Domestic Gross: $119,114,517
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $175,698,702

While not all of documentarian Michael Moore’s films may hold the impact of his best work (Roger & Me [1989] and Bowling for Columbine [2002]), his unapologetic look at how Bush administration used the tragedy to push for war in Afghanistan and Iraq to ostensibly fight terrorism certainly held its own. Fahrenheit 9/11 is, unequivocally, the highest grossing documentary of all time and one of the more harrowing looks into the details of the office of the president as it analyzes the the moral ambiguities of the first George W. Bush administration.

4. Lincoln (2012)

Original Domestic Gross: $182,207,973
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $208,759,258

Director Steven Spielberg’s masterful Lincoln concerns itself not with the reasons the Civil War was fought (though that is touched on of course) but with Lincoln’s decision during the height of the war to emancipate the slaves. Daniel Day-Lewis’s performance as Lincoln is easily that which the film will be most remembered for, but Spielberg’s film is a far more gripping tale of the good that this country can accomplish than the evils it can perpetrate than it may often be given credit for.

3. All The President’s Men (1976)

Original Domestic Gross: $51,048,435
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $310,573,335

While the story of how reporters Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) and Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) meticulously uncover and report the intricacies of the Watergate scandal certainly leads to the destruction of a President, All the President’s Men is also one of the most engaging pieces of political intrigue ever captured on film. Alan J. Pakula’s film was ahead of its time in many respects, but making the journalist and the truth the hero of the story will never go out of style.

2. Air Force One (1997)

Original Domestic Gross: $172,956,409
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $345,138,926

Harrison Ford stars as President James Marshall in director Wolfgang Petersen’s action-packed Air Force One that delivers a two-hour plus interpretation of “Die Hard in Air Force One.” Gary Oldman even does a formidable take on Hans Gruber as the Russian terrorist Ivan Korshunov. Ford is tailor-made for the role and somehow manages to make the silliest of lines (i.e. “Get off my plane!”) sound heroic and presidential.

1. Independence Day (1996)

Original Domestic Gross: $306,169,255
Adjusted Domestic Gross: $634,504,608

Of course, President Thomas J. Whitmore, as portrayed by Bill Pullman, is a completely fictional character and is only one of many competing main characters in director Roland Emmerich’s science-fiction epic, Independence Day, but his portrayal of an honest-to-god heroic president that is willing to fight for the people of not only his own country, but of the world as well is one of the reasons that this film made as much money as it did. Of course, launching the film career of box-office superstar Will Smith probably didn’t hurt that much either. In any event, President Whitmore is one of the few fictional movie presidents that you truly wish was real.

Mike Tyrkus

Editor in Chief at CinemaNerdz.com
An independent filmmaker, co-writer and director of over a dozen short films, the Editor in Chief of CinemaNerdz.com has spent much of the last three decades as a writer and editor specializing in biographical and critical reference sources in literature and the cinema, beginning in February 1991 reviewing films for his college newspaper. He was a member of the Detroit Film Critics Society, as well as the group's webmaster and one-time President for over a decade until the group ceased to exist. His contributions to film criticism can be found in Magill's Cinema Annual, VideoHound's Golden Movie Retriever (of which he was the editor for nearly a decade until it too ceased to exist), the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, and the St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia (on which he collaborated with editor Andrew Sarris). He has also appeared on the television program Critic LEE Speaking alongside Lee Thomas of FOX2 and Adam Graham, of The Detroit News. He currently lives in the Detroit area with his wife and their dogs.

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