Hi All.

Welcome to The Top 20 Actors and Top 20 Actresses Lists.

For this section, I collected the Box office statistics for most of the A-List actors and actresses whose movies have performed well at the Box Office. I used those figures to calculate 6 different lists. You will be able to see how all actors and actresses compare with each other in each list, not just the top 20. The lists are sorted by Avg. B.O. of movies the actor/actress starred in, by the Avg. B.O. of all movies the actor/actress has been in, by the Avg. B.O. of films in the 90's, by the Avg. B.O. of the last 10 films, by the total gross of all movies, and finally by the number of films that have earned over $100 Million. Also below you will find Profile pages for each of the actors/actresses with more information on each.
In the lists, if there is a red asterisk (*) for the rank, it means that that actor/actress has not had at least 10 movies. Therefore I don't count it towards the rankings.
The money figures are all in Millions of dollars.
I wanted to tell you how I did it so that if any one had an argument on why an actor was not on the list, I would want them to follow the same calculations so that we can determine if that actor belongs in the list.

To get to the top 20 Actors I got a list of all the movies that have made over 100 Million dollars in domestic gross(US). Over 144 movies. Then I went through the list of these movies and listed each one of the actors that I thought would be in more than one 100 Million movies(The Main actors).

Then I added the total for each actor of all their 100 Million movies. Then I ordered the list in order of the actors that had grossed the most in the 100 Million Movies.

I then took the top 40 actors from this list. For each actor, I calculated the totals, for all the movies they ever made. And then calculated the averages. For the totals for each movie, I used IMDBas the source for the numbers. Since numbers are less accurate from before the 80's, actors that had been in the business for a long time, like James Earl Jones, got "penalized" when I calculated their all time averages. And I didn't think that was fair. So I decided to create 3 different lists.

One that listed the top 20 actors according to the total gross of all their movies. This list is more unfair to the actors that have not been in the business for too long.

Another list for the top 20 actors according to the average gross of the movies that actor has made. I said before, I thought this was a little unfair to the actors that have been in the business for a long time.

A third list for the top 20 actors according to the average gross of their top 10 movies. I thought this was more fair than the other two list.

Some more points:

• An actor had to be in at least 10 movies to be considered. That's why Gary Sinise is "red out". I did this because, there are lots of actors that have been in few movies, but they were in a really successful movie, so their average will pass everybody else.
• I didn't take into account Documentaries, Shorts, TV and straight to video movies. Essentially I counted those roles in which the actor was credited and it was a released to theaters.
• I didn't take into account jobs as an extra.
• I calculated the numbers for 40 actors, but I believe the top 20 are more accurate. that's why the other 20 are grayed out.
• I didn't calculate the numbers for all the actors, so I can not guarantee that my list actually gave the top 20 actors. But it gives and idea of who they are.
• I'm human, I could have and probably made some mistakes. If you find any, let me know.