Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ Tops $125M in Global Box Office: See Where It Ranks Among Top 25 Music Biopics

The films on this list cover a wide range of genres, including rap, classical, country, Latin and contemporary Christian.

Mar 17, 2025 - 16:26
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Bob Dylan Biopic ‘A Complete Unknown’ Tops $125M in Global Box Office: See Where It Ranks Among Top 25 Music Biopics

The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown has topped the $125 million threshold in worldwide box-office grosses, according to boxofficemojo.com. The film, which has grossed $127.4 million as of Monday (March 17), now ranks No. 7 on Billboard‘s list of music biopics with the highest worldwide grosses.

Timothée Chalamet stars in A Complete Unknown, which follows Dylan from January 1961, when he moved from Minnesota to New York City, to July 1965, when he caused an uproar by playing electronic instruments at the Newport Folk Festival. James Mangold, who directed the Johnny Cash biopic Walk the Line (which is No. 5 on the list), also did the honors here.

A Complete Unknown received eight Oscar nominations on Jan. 23, and made Oscar history as the first music biopic to receive three acting nods – for Chalamet as Dylan, Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. The film was shut out on Oscar night, March 2 — though Chalamet, seated in the front row in a canary-yellow suit, probably got more close-up reaction shots than anyone else.

Here are the highest-grossing biopics of musicians in terms of worldwide box office. We didn’t include a few high-grossing films about real-life music personalities because they’re not biopics in the traditional sense. These include The Sound of Music (which tells the story of Maria von Trapp and the Trapp Family Singers); Green Book (which deals with a road trip taken by pianist and composer Don Shirley); Florence Foster Jenkins (about an heiress and hopelessly untalented soprano by that name); and Music of the Heart (about violinist and music educator Roberta Guaspari). Meryl Streep starred in the latter two films.

Here are the 25 biopics of music stars with the highest worldwide grosses.