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Released
1990 · FILM

Bullet in the Head

Three childhood friends from Hong Kong's slums find themselves trapped in the chaos of war-torn Saigon after a deadly mistake forces them to flee, now fighting to survive against enemies both foreign and familiar.

Once The Best of Friends, Now The Worst of... Enemies!

Directed by
Runtime
130 min
Language
CN
ActionCrimeDrama
Streaming on
  • The Criterion Channel

Synopsis

Three childhood friends from the slums of Hong Kong flee to war-time Saigon after accidentally murdering a gang leader, but their troubles only escalate.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 19

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 John WooShot by Wilson ChanScored by Sherman ChowDesigned by Wah Sang Leung

Box Office

1990 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.3× 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

$1.1M

Budget$3.5M
Worldwide gross$1.1M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Bullet in the Headde
  • Die xue jie toude
  • Bullet in the Headen
  • Die xue jie touen
  • Una bala en la cabezaes
  • Une balle dans la têtefr

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