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Wednesday, February 11th, 2026

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Misleading box office statistics for "Grease"

At https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/never_in_top/?by_rank_threshold=1 there is a list of the Top-Grossing Movies That Never Hit #1.

At #32 on this list is Grease, for which Box Office Mojo has no weekend listed where it ranked higher than #2. 

However, for the film's original release in 1978, BOM has only one weekend's worth of results. As can be seen at https://www.boxofficemojo.com/weekend/by-year/1978/, BOM only has data for 16 of the 52 weekends of the year -- and for most of those weekends, only 1 or 2 films are listed. Other than Star Wars, most films have only one weekend's worth of data from 1978. This is a consequence of the undeveloped state of box office reporting in the 1970s.

While Grease apparently did not win its opening weekend against Jaws 2, BOM has no data at all for three of the next four weekends (and in the weekend for which it does have data, nothing is listed for Grease). Since Grease was the biggest box office hit of the summer of 1978 (see https://www.usatoday.com/picture-gallery/life/2019/06/22/biggest-summer-blockbuster-each-year-since-1975/39608665/ and https://www.boxofficemojo.com/season/summer/1978/) and in fact the entire year 1978 (see https://www.boxofficemojo.com/year/1978/), I suspect that it actually did win at least one of the weekends for which the data is missing.

Summary of the issue:

My recommendation would be to just remove Grease from the list of the Top-Grossing Movies That Never Hit #1 because the data about what movies did hit #1 each weekend of its original release are largely unavailable.

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2 months ago

Hello @gromit82,

Thank you for reporting this. Please know that we have forwarded your information to the Box Office Mojo team to address your request. We will email you back when we receive an update on this.

Thank you in advance for your patience.

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6 days ago

Hi gromit82 -

I'm following up here as our Box Office Mojo team completed their review.

You're absolutely right that weekend box office reporting from the 1970s is incomplete. Our data for 1978 reflects the limited information available from that era, and we acknowledge that many weekends and full charts are not represented.

Our "Never Hit #1" chart is generated based on the verified weekend ranking data currently available in our database.  Since we don't have a recorded weekend showing Grease at #1, it qualifies for inclusion under the chart's methodology.   While we understand that a #1 placement is plausible given the film's overall performance as the top-grossing movie of 1978, we're unable to speculate or infer rankings for weekends where verified data is unavailable.

So unfortunately, without sufficient verified weekend-level data to retroactively confirm a #1 ranking for Grease, we're unable to remove it from the list at this time.

I hope this helps clarify the current chart data.

(edited)