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Spider-Man: No Way Home is Willem Dafoe’s highest-grossing film on reported worldwide theatrical figures, at $2,082,946,575 according to Salty Popcorn’s actor page. Aquaman, Finding Dory and Finding Nemo follow, and four Spider-Man films place in the top ten. The list below ranks only the films that have usable worldwide box-office data, so it covers a fraction of Dafoe’s full screen work.
How this ranking is built
Every figure here is a reported worldwide theatrical gross in US dollars. That is a nominal total: the box-office amount as recorded, not adjusted for inflation, and not net of costs. It measures money taken at cinemas around the world, so it says nothing about profit, ticket counts or how well a film was received.
Two rules decide which films appear:
- Acting credit. The film must list Dafoe as an actor in the database entry, not as a writer, producer or director.
- Usable worldwide data. The database must hold a reported worldwide theatrical total. A credit without one is left out, even if the film is well known.
Voice roles qualify under the same rules. Dafoe’s fish character Gill in Finding Nemo and Finding Dory is the clearest case, and it is why both films appear in the top five. The databases used here do not publish a separate rule for uncredited cameos, so a reader checking a specific small role should look at that film’s own entry rather than assume it is counted.
Which databases the figures come from
Two secondary database sites supply the numbers. Neither is a studio or distributor record.
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FilmDB
FilmDB tracks 221 acting credits for Dafoe. Only 56 of those films have usable reported worldwide theatrical gross. The other 165 acting credits have no usable worldwide box-office figure, so they cannot be ranked by this method. FilmDB rounds its totals, which matters for the comparison later in this article.
Salty Popcorn
Salty Popcorn’s actor page is arranged by global gross and displays exact totals. Its leading entries form a complete ordered list, but its figures do not always match FilmDB’s. The page does not date each figure in the material reviewed, so treat its totals as a snapshot that may be revised.
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The top ten by worldwide gross
The table uses Salty Popcorn’s displayed order and totals, with Dafoe’s role in each film.
| Rank | Film | Dafoe’s role | Reported worldwide gross |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Spider-Man: No Way Home | Norman Osborn / Green Goblin | $2,082,946,575 |
| 2 | Aquaman | Vulko | $1,148,061,807 |
| 3 | Finding Dory | Gill (voice) | $1,028,570,942 |
| 4 | Finding Nemo | Gill (voice) | $940,352,645 |
| 5 | Spider-Man 3 | Green Goblin / Norman Osborn | $892,448,390 |
| 6 | Spider-Man | Green Goblin / Norman Osborn | $826,571,038 |
| 7 | Spider-Man 2 | Green Goblin / Norman Osborn | $785,311,897 |
| 8 | Beetlejuice Beetlejuice | Wolf Jackson | $451,100,435 |
| 9 | Murder on the Orient Express | Gerhard Hardman | $348,501,095 |
| 10 | The Great Wall | Ballard | $334,550,106 |
Franchise titles dominate the upper part of the list. Four of the top ten are Spider-Man films, all with Dafoe as the Green Goblin or Norman Osborn except No Way Home, where he returns in the same character. Two of the top five are animated films in which he voices a single character.
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Where the two sources disagree
The headline figures differ between the two databases, so the order is clear but the exact totals are not interchangeable.
| Film | Salty Popcorn | FilmDB |
|---|---|---|
| Spider-Man: No Way Home | $2,082,946,575 | $2.02 billion (rounded) |
| Aquaman | $1,148,061,807 | $1.15 billion (rounded) |
Use one source for every figure in a piece. If you quote exact totals, name the source and its display date. Do not blend numbers from the two databases, because their methods and update timing are not shown to be the same. For Spider-Man: No Way Home, the gap between $2.08 billion and $2.02 billion is large enough to matter in any comparison.
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Reading the figures correctly
- Worldwide gross is not profit. A film’s budget, marketing costs and the share kept by cinemas are not deducted.
- Totals are not inflation-adjusted. Older films such as the Spider-Man titles from the early 2000s are compared in today’s dollars only as recorded at the time of their release, so a 2002 total and a 2024 total are not directly equivalent.
- Totals are not a measure of quality. A high gross can reflect a franchise’s reach, a re-release or a long theatrical run, not the strength of a performance.
What the list does not cover
The ranking covers only the 56 films with usable worldwide figures in FilmDB. The 165 other acting credits, including smaller independent and festival titles, are not ranked, and no source reviewed establishes a full ranking of every Dafoe appearance. Readers looking for a complete career order will need a source that publishes every credit with its own financial data, and should expect that many of those films have no reported worldwide gross at all.
Totals can also shift as films are re-released, as new markets report figures, or as the databases update, so the order at the top of the list is more stable than the exact dollar amounts.
Quick Recap
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