Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll

The Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll were polls on determining the bankability of movie stars. They began quite early in the movie history. At first, they were popular polls and contests conducted in film magazines, where the readers would vote for their favorite stars, like the poll published in "New York Morning Telegraph" on 17 December 1911. Magazines appeared and disappeared often and among the most consistent in those early days were the polls in the "Motion Picture Magazine".
Though this and numerous other magazines, like "Photoplay", continued with this type of poll, the standards for the polling were set by the Quigley Publishing Company. They published a poll, which became known as the "Top Ten Money Making Stars Poll", from a questionnaire sent to movie exhibitors every year between 1915 and 2013 by Quigley Publishing Company. The list was based on a poll of movie theater owners, who were asked to name who they felt were the previous year's top 10 money-making stars. The Top 10 Poll, which appeared annually in Quigley's "Motion Picture Herald" and "The Motion Picture Almanac", was long regarded as one of the most reliable barometers of a movie star's box-office power, as film exhibitors base their decisions on one economic criterion: those stars who will bring patrons into their theaters.
For the 1915–1924 period, the list was compiled from 200,000 exhibitor reports, published in the "What the Picture Did for Me" department in 520 weekly editions of the "Exhibitors Herald" magazine. The first version of the questionnaire, specifically made for the exhibitors to vote for the money-makers, was used from 1925 to 1931. It included voting for both the box office films and the stars. A standardized questionnaire specifically for choosing the biggest box office stars was used since 1933.
Select top 25 lists.
In addition to the top ten stars for that year, the Quigley Poll would commonly list the next 15 stars as well. A sample of these, including some of the predecessors' lists, are below:
Top ten Western stars.
For a number of years, there was also a poll for the top ten Western stars in the United States. 
 
Top Ten Money Makers in Britain.
The "Motion Picture Herald" published a similar list for the UK, listing the most popular stars at the British box office, including the most popular British stars.
 
Top Stars in France.
Various polls have been taken for the top stars in France too.
Box Office Poison.
In 1938 a list was published of stars who were considered "box office poison" by exhibitors. The list was from Harry Brandt of the Independent Theater Owners Association.
The stars included:
"Variety"s Over Priced Stars of 1968.
In 1968 "Variety" magazine published a list of ten stars it considered overpriced. The stars charged at least $250,000 a film and had at least four flops in a row recently: