Crocodile Dundee turns 40 and two Australian lists cannot agree where it ranks
Forty years after it opened in America, Crocodile Dundee is still described as the highest-grossing film of all time in Australia. It is not, it never was, and the two bodies that keep the list cannot agree on whether it is 28th or 32nd.
Crocodile Dundee opened in the United States on 26 September 1986. Saturday is the fortieth anniversary, and the film will spend it being described, as it has been for most of those forty years, as the highest-grossing film of all time in Australia.
It is the highest-grossing Australian film. One word, and the whole sentence turns over.
Screen Australia puts it plainly: the number one Australian film at the Australian box office is Crocodile Dundee, with A$47,707,598 in current dollars. On the all-time chart of every film released in Australia, the number one is Avatar, at A$118,985,016 — two and a half times as much.
Twenty-eighth or thirty-second, depending on who keeps the list
Screen Australia's Top 50 All Time places Crocodile Dundee 28th. Wikipedia's list of highest-grossing films in Australia places it 32nd. Both cite the same gross — A$47,707,598 — so the disagreement is not about the film. It is about which titles get counted, how re-releases are folded in, and whose currency-adjustment date applies.
Four places is not a scandal. It is, however, a useful illustration of what an all-time nominal chart actually is: an artefact of accounting conventions, with the same film landing in two different neighbourhoods depending on which office maintains the spreadsheet.
The top of the chart, for scale: Avatar A$118,985,016; Star Wars: The Force Awakens A$94,052,875; Avatar: The Way of Water A$93,762,270; Top Gun: Maverick A$93,536,383; Barbie A$86,456,455.
The US$328 million is a Guinness entry with no date on it
The worldwide figure attached to Crocodile Dundee everywhere is US$328 million. Chase it to its source and you arrive at a Guinness World Records entry which states that the film "has grossed US$328 million (£218 million) since it was first released."
Since it was first released. No as-of date. No methodology. No note on which exchange rate converted the sterling figure, or in which year. It is a legacy number, recycled for four decades as though it were current, and it is the only citation the internet has for the film's worldwide total.
Some listings now give it to the dollar — US$328,203,506 — which is a level of precision that an undated aggregate cannot support.
The film cannot agree with itself about anything else either
- Australian release date: 24 April 1986 in one place, 30 April 1986 in another, on the same encyclopedia page.
- Budget: A$8.8 million in the film's infobox, "under $10 million" in its own body text, and A$11.5 million on the chart page that lists it.
- Australian gross: A$47,707,045 on one page, A$47,707,598 on another. A A$553 gap between two articles on the same site.
- Runtime: 104 minutes in Australia, 98 internationally, with a chunk of Australian slang redubbed for overseas audiences. Six minutes, not the half-hour the legend usually claims.
What the numbers do support
In the United States and Canada it took $174,803,506 across its full run, finishing second for 1986 behind Top Gun's $176,781,728. Worth separating from that: its calendar-1986 gross was $116,849,307, meaning roughly a third of the domestic total arrived after the year it is credited to. "Second-biggest film of 1986" and "second-biggest earner during 1986" are different statements, and the second one is closer to what the box-office charts actually record.
It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, shared between three writers. And forty years on, no Australian production has come near it — not adjusted, not unadjusted, not in any of the versions of the list.
What is still unknown
What the worldwide gross actually is, in any currency, as of any date. Whether the two Australian rankings will ever reconcile. And whether a 4K release circulating this year comes with a street date anyone has confirmed — at time of writing, nobody has published one.
A film about a man who is constantly underestimated has spent four decades being oversold by a single adjective. Drop "of all time in Australia," keep "Australian film," and the record is not only true — it is a better record than the one people keep claiming.