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Poster for 8 ½ Women
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Released
1999 · FILM

8 ½ Women

“If every man thinks of sex once every nine minutes, what does he think of the other eight?”

Directed by
Peter Greenaway
Written by
Peter Greenaway
Runtime
121 min
ComedyDrama

Synopsis

Following his wife's death, middle‑aged businessman Philip Emmenthal, encouraged by his son Storey, fills his Geneva villa with eight and a half concubines. Three of the women come from Kyoto, where Storey oversees Pachinco palaces. The group includes a nun, a child bearer, a gambler, a student of Kabuki, a horsewoman who keeps a pet pig, and a maid. Over the course of a year, the women start to assert their own power.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 21

These are the principals we have on file — the full crew ran to the hundreds. Every film this size was made by far more hands than any credits list ever names.

Why a floor?

This is a minimum, not a total. We only count the credits we’ve captured so far, and coverage is uneven — a blockbuster might show a few hundred names while another of the same size shows a couple dozen. The real crews all ran into the thousands. The number here only grows as full credits are enriched — so we frame it as a floor, never a headcount.

Craft leads on file

Edited by Elmer LeupenShot by Reinier Van BrummelenScored by Frank LoesserDesigned by Wilbert Van Dorp

Box Office

1999 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.1× its budget

Why 2.5×?

Cinemas keep roughly half of every ticket sold, and a wide release’s marketing often costs about as much again as the film — so a movie needs to gross around 2.5× its production budget just to break even theatrically. It’s a rule of thumb, not the studio’s ledger (home video and streaming come later).

Worldwide gross

$438K

Budget$6.0M
Worldwide gross$438K
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • 8 1/2 Frauende
  • 8½ Frauende
  • 8½ Womenen
  • 8 mujeres y ½es
  • 8 femmes ½fr
  • 8 donne e ½it

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