Box Office Attractions - SIDNEY POITIER

For my next box office attraction, I chose Sidney Poitier. And while Sidney has had a long and successful film career, I want to focus on one year in particular. 1967. That was pretty much Sidney's break-out year even though he had already been on the film scene since the mid-50's. But in 1967, he had a year for the record books. The three films he made that year all landed in the top 20, and two of them finished in the top 10. They were To Sir, With Love, In The Heat Of The Night, and Guess Who's Coming To Dinner. Thanks to the box-office success of these three films, Sidney finished the year as the 7th most successful actor for the year right behind stars like Elizabeth Taylor, Sean Connery and Paul Newman.You would be hard pressed to find another actor who had the success he had when you compare the ratio of films released in a given year and how successful they were. I mean many other actors had bigger moneymakers to be sure, but Sidney did the hat trick: a perfect 3 for 3. The only other actor I know to have done that is modern actor Jim Carrey. He did the same thing in 1994: went 3 for 3 with Ace Ventura, The Mask and Dumb and Dumber. Anyway back to Sidney, while he never had another big year like 1967, he still had lots of successful films. Other hits included The Defiant Ones (1958), A Raisin In The Sun (1961), Lilies of the Field (1963), A Patch Of Blue (1965), Uptown Saturday Night (1974), Let's Do It Again (1975), A Piece Of The Action (1977), Shoot To Kill (1988), Sneakers (1992), and The Jackal (1997). His career has spanned an impressive 40 years. Below are the numbers and rankings for his amazing year in 1967.

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER (rank for the year-3rd)       $25.5 million

TO SIR, WITH LOVE  (8th)                                                               $19.1 million

IN THE HEAT OF THE NIGHT(12th)                                              $11 million

Numbers provided by Box Office Report.com