Plot

Charlie Bucket (Peter Ostrum) is a poor, but hopeful, brave, wise and honest boy who lives in poverty with his widowed mother and four grandparents. On his way home from school one day, his newspaper route takes him past the gate of the town's mysterious, but highly-regarded candy-maker, Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder)'s Chocolate Factory. As Charlie peers through the gates, a tinker appears behind Charlie and tells him that nobody ever goes into Wonka's Factory, and nobody ever comes out of it either.

Later that night, Charlie discusses this with his Grandpa Joe (Jack Albertson). Joe explains that the tinker was right. Many years ago, other candy makers, especially Arthur Slugworth, were sending in spies dressed as workers to steal Wonka's secret recipes. Finally, Mr. Wonka laid off all of his workers, closed the factory and vanished. Three years later, the factory started up again, and more candies and chocolates were coming out, but the gates stayed locked, so that no one would steal their recipes. The identities of Wonka's new workers remains a mystery.

The next day at school, word, news and announcements spread quickly that a contest has been launched, hidden among five out of billions of Wonka's chocolate bars are five golden tickets. The big prize is that those who find these tickets, will receive a lifetime supply of chocolate and get to visit Mr. Wonka's long-isolated factory for a free tour. The world then goes crazy, with Wonka chocolates being sold out at almost every store.

The first ticket is found by a gluttonous greedy German boy, named Augustus Gloop (Michael Bollner). The second is found by a spoiled and bossily immature little girl named Veruca Salt (Julie Dawn Cole), whose father utilized his peanut factory workers to open Wonka bars from dawn until dusk. The third is found by a girl named Violet Beauregarde (Denise Nickerson), who is an avid gum chewer, having chewed a piece of gum for three months straight to achieve a world record. The fourth is found by a boy named Mike TeeVee (Paris Themmen), who is obsessed with guns and television, particularly westerns.

A mysterious, man (Gunter Meisner) always shows up and whispers into the ticket winners' ears.

While these children claim the tickets in turn, and while various adults go to absurd lengths to find the tickets on their own, Charlie spends one night wandering about town thinking of what'll happen if he misses out. Grandpa Joe uses his tobacco money to buy two Wonka bars, one at a time, for Charlie. Neither bar contains a ticket. But the bond between Charlie and his Great Grandfather is all the stronger for that.

Finally, a Paraguayan television network announces that a millionaire, living in the Andes, has claimed the fifth ticket. With (no more tickets to hunt for, the world gets back to normal. Charlie is heartbroken at the chance he missed, but is back at school the next day, doing his best to put it all behind him.

On his way to deliver newspapers, he finds some money in a storm drain next to the candy shop. He fishes out the coin and goes in to buy Wonka Chocolates, including a regular Wonka bar. Then as he goes to claim his papers to start his route, he overhears a commotion over a headline: "FIFTH TICKET FRAUD". While a crowd of adults is talking about the Paraguayan's con, Charlie starts, very slowly, to unwrap the Wonka bar he bought and finds the fifth golden ticket.

Charlie's discovery electrifies the towns folk: one of their own has claimed the genuine fifth ticket. His fanfare consists of holding it up and celebrating for about a minute or so with his paper-route customers, his boss, Mr. Jopeck and anyone who happens to be looking on--no big deal compared to the media hype that greeted the other children, but that doesn't matter, not to Charlie. What matters is at last he will get a chance to walk into the factory that has mystified him all his life. The ticket also entitles him to a lifetime supply of chocolate. Mr. Jopeck helps Charlie, still holding the ticket out of the crowd and tells him to hold onto the ticket and to run straight home and not stop until he gets there, which Charlie does very happily.

But as Charlie turns the corner, he runs into the very man who has insinuated himself into all the other celebrations (though Charlie, not being media-savvy, doesn't know this). The man introduces himself as Arthur Slugworth and offers Charlie 10,000 stock certificates if he will quietly abstract from the factory a secret prototype recipe of an Everlasting Gobstopper formula.

Charlie rushes the rest of the way home and announces his find. Grandpa Joe reads the ticket's terms which says the tour is October first, which is the next day. Under them, the holder may bring one adult family member as a chaperone. Charlie selects Grandpa Joe, who happily agrees and manages to get out of bed for the first time in 20 years.

The next morning, the town puts on a celebration, with a band, to see the opening of the factory doors. Promptly at ten o'clock, the door opens. Out walks Willy Wonka, leaning heavily on a cane, and follows a pathway on the pavement. He gets to the end of the path, and leaves the cane behind, stuck into the ground. And then he leans over, and is about to fall...and finishes with a somersault, setting the entrance sets for the adventure that follows.

He calls all the ticket holders to step forward. Verruca Salt insists on going in first, though hers was the second ticket. Neither of the other kids care about which order they go in though. The kids introduce themselves and Wonka greets them, the other four kids parents, (for the girls, their fathers, for Augustus and Mike, their mothers), and Grandpa Joe.

Wonka leads them all inside, where first he asks the kids to sign a contract with print that starts out large and ends in being very small.

After the kids have all signed the contract, the tour begins. The first stop is the chocolate room, which includes a candy land with a river of chocolate and other sweets. The visitors meet Wonka's workers, short dwarfish men with orange skin and green hair known as Oompa-Loompas, who Wonka transported to work and live at the factory from their country of Loompaland, which is revealed to be a terrible monstrous jungle country.

Inside the tour that follows, the kids, one by one, fall victim to temptation that play upon their most profound weaknesses of character. Augustus Gloop falls into the river of chocolate and gets sucked up in an extractor pipe. They go through a dark tunnel on Wonka's Wonkatania boat and visit the Inventing room, where Violet starts chewing on an unfinished experimental prototype gum that is supposed to have all the taste of a three-course dinner with blueberry pie for dessert, and seems to transform into a giant talking blueberry. Veruca, the selfish ingrate, falls through an educated "Egg-Dicator", which can tell the difference between good and bad golden chocolate Easter eggs laid by giant golden geese, and down the garbage chute where all the bad ones go and her father follows her down. Mike, impressed by Wonka's newest invention called "Wonkavision", which can shrink down Giant Wonka bars and transmit them through television, goes through it and ends up reduced into a tiny little person to about a twelfth of his normal size.

Charlie and Grandpa Joe also given into temptation. In between the girls' mishaps, they sample Fizzy Lifting Drinks and end up floating up a chimney and risk running into an exhaust fan. They manage to burp their way down, and rejoin the others. But at the end of the tour, Wonka thanks the two for coming and heads into his office--which, when Charlie and Grandpa Joe open the door, turns out to have furnishings sawn in half--half a clock, half a sink, half a table--and half a desk, where Wonka sits on half a chair. Grandpa Joe asks about the lifetime supply of chocolate the ticket promised. Wonka replies Charlie disqualified himself by stealing Fizzy Lifting drinks, which violated the contract.

Grandpa Joe becomes angry at Wonka and suggests that Charlie give Slugworth the prototype Gobstopper as revenge, but Charlie can't bring himself to hurt Wonka intentionally, and approaches Wonka one last time and sets the Candy on his desk.

All of a sudden, Wonka joyously declares Charlie has won, reinstates the chocolate prize and reveals that "Slugworth" is actually an employee of his named Mr. Wilkinson; the offer to buy the Gobstopper was a morality test for the kids, which only Charlie passed.

Wonka then says that there's so much to do and leads Charlie and Grandpa Joe into the Great Glass Wonka-Vator, a multi-directional glass Elevator that can go to any room in the factory. Wonka says that up until now he has pressed all but one button in the craft and encourages Charlie to press it. That one button press sends the craft, and the three, through the glass ceiling and into the sky floating around town to a height that shows a view of the factory and the town around it. Wonka asks Charlie how he liked the factory, to which Charlie thinks it's the most wonderful place in the whole world. Wonka is pleased that Charlie loves the factory and is giving it to him, to Charlie and Grandpa Joe's surprise. Wonka reveals that the golden ticket contest was created to help him find an heir to run his factory and look after the Oompa Loompas. To make the deal sweeter, Wonka says Charlie and his family can move in right away. Charlie enthusiastically accepts this ultimate award and they fly off into the sky as the credits roll.