Michele Morrone leads the ranking of the Italian actors with the highest grossing films in 2026, ahead of Matilda De Angelis and Miriam Leone. Here are the data from the PlayersTime research and the role of Hollywood in the success of Italian stars.
The name that dominates the ranking of the highest grossing Italian actors in cinema is not that of a star who has been established for decades, nor of one of the protagonists of the most awarded Italian films of recent years. He is Michele Morrone, the actor who gained international popularity thanks to 365 days and who, according to new research by PlayersTime, is associated with over 400 million dollars in box office receipts in the period examined. Behind her, with decidedly lower figures, are Matilda De Angelis and Miriam Leone, in a photograph of the film industry that above all tells how much participation in a major Hollywood production can affect the commercial dimension of the career of an Italian interpreter.
The research, published by PlayersTime and updated with box office data as of August 11, 2026, took into consideration 200 international actors and actresses, adding the worldwide takings of their 2025 and 2026 film releases and combining these data with the number of followers on Instagram and the monthly volumes of searches on Google. The box office ranking considers all the films in which the performers have participated, regardless of the importance of the role, and therefore does not measure how much each actor personally contributed to the commercial success of a film.
Michele Morrone, international success thanks to Una di famiglia
With 400.8 million dollars attributed to the films in which he starred, Michele Morrone occupies first position in the Italian selection of PlayersTime, thanks above all to his participation in Una di famiglia – The Housemaid, the psychological thriller directed by Paul Feig and based on the novel by Freida McFadden, which arrived in American theaters in December 2025 and in Italian ones at the beginning of 2026.
In the film, which stars Sydney Sweeney and Amanda Seyfried in the lead roles, Morrone plays Enzo, a character that allowed him to join the cast of an internationally distributed Hollywood production. It is above all the commercial result of the film that explains the figure that places it ahead of other Italian performers: according to Box Office Mojo, The Housemaid has reached around 400.5 million dollars in worldwide takings, a figure which substantially corresponds to the total reported by the research.
The actor’s path represents one of the most interesting transformations of the contemporary star system, in which the notoriety built through a streaming platform can become a starting point for obtaining visibility in productions destined for the big screen. In the case of Morrone, however, the commercial leap recorded in the ranking is mainly linked to the participation in a single internationally successful film, rather than to a series of productions capable of obtaining similar results.
Matilda De Angelis and Miriam Leone complete the podium
In second place in the Italian ranking is Matilda De Angelis, to whom PlayersTime attributes 45.5 million dollars in total earnings, while third position is occupied by Miriam Leone, with 8.3 million dollars.
For De Angelis, among the film titles considered in the research is The Lesson, the psychological thriller directed by Stefano Mordini, based on the novel of the same name by Marco Franzoso and distributed in Italian cinemas on 5 March 2026, in which the actress plays a young lawyer who, after defending a university professor from the accusation of sexual violence, finds herself involved in an affair marked by suspicions, threats and psychological manipulation. Stefano Accorsi stars alongside her in the film.
Miriam Leone is instead among the protagonists of Le cose non didetta, the film by Gabriele Muccino which arrived in Italian cinemas on 29 January 2026, in which she stars together with Stefano Accorsi, Claudio Santamaria and Carolina Crescentini. The film tells of a sentimental and family crisis that develops during a trip to Morocco, intertwining couple relationships, secrets and tensions that have remained unresolved for a long time.
The gap between the three performers also highlights a structural limit of the ranking: the comparison takes place between films that operate on different production and distribution scales, with budgets, reference markets and commercial possibilities that are difficult to overlap. In fact, a Hollywood thriller distributed in numerous countries and an Italian film intended mainly for the national market contribute to the ranking through the same indicator, the worldwide box office, without the result being automatically interpreted as a measure of the individual popularity or artistic value of the actors involved.
Hollywood and Italian cinema: two different ways of building success
The Italian ranking is part of an international research which sees Jon Bernthal associated with 4.33 billion dollars in total takings, thanks also to his participation in productions such as Spider-Man: Brand New Day and Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. The report also considers the presence on social networks and the interest aroused by stars on search engines, two indicators that contribute to describing their public visibility, although not necessarily demonstrating the ability to attract spectators to theaters.
According to Diliana Hristova, analyst at PlayersTime, the Italian results show how participation in a single international production can quickly change the commercial profile of an actor, while paths like those of Matilda De Angelis and Miriam Leone illustrate the possibility of developing a career through national productions and projects also aimed at foreign markets.
The most interesting data of the research is therefore not only the primacy of Michele Morrone, but the distance between the economic results of productions that belong to different markets: a distance that tells how much international distribution can affect the commercial visibility of the performers and how much, for Italian actors, the move to Hollywood can modify the economic dimensions of the projects in which they participate, without this necessarily constituting a measure of their actual power of appeal at the box office.
