We all remember the movies that made our childhoods – “Lion King,” “Aladdin,” “Toy Story” and its sequels – or maybe non-Disney classics like “Iron Giant,” “My Neighbor Totoro,” or “Pokémon: The First Movie.” (If you’re a Disney fan, you may be interested in the best Disney movies of all time.)

Whether you watched them in theaters, on VHS or DVD, or through streaming services, these movies were mainstays that helped make sleepovers, birthdays, and weekends so memorable.

As children, we likely didn’t realize how much our ticket purchase and subsequent viewership was helping the media giants producing these films, or how such financial success led to the creation of famous sequels like “Toy Story” Nos. 2, 3, and 4. But you might be surprised to know now just how much money each of these hit children’s movies made at the time of their release. (These are the highest-grossing kids’ movies of all time.)

To determine not just the highest-grossing but the most profitable kids movies of all time, 24/7 Tempo reviewed data on worldwide box office and production budgets for movies rated “G” by the Motion Picture Association from The Numbers, an online movie database owned by Nash Information Services. (G-rated films not obviously aimed at children – like “Gone With the Wind” and “2001: A Space Odyssey” were excluded from consideration.)

Movies were ranked based on the ratio of worldwide box office receipts to production budget, with data for both adjusted for inflation using historical ticket prices from the National Association of Theater Owners. Supplemental data on average user ratings from IMDb, an online movie and TV database owned by Amazon, and Tomatometer scores from Rotten Tomatoes, an online movie and TV review aggregator, are current as of March 2022.

Click here for the most profitable kids movies of all time