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Poster for Fire Birds
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Released
1990 · FILM

Fire Birds

The best just got better

Directed by
Runtime
85 min
ActionAdventure

Synopsis

A joint operation between the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Army has been launched to dismantle one of the largest drug cartels in South America. Several attempts to attack the cartel's mountainous stronghold have been repeatedly blocked by a Scorpion-attack helicopter flown by cartel leader Eric Stoller (Bert Rhine). After multiple aircraft, including a pair of UH–60 Black Hawks and their AH–1 Cobra escorts, were shot down, the army deployed the new AH–64 Apache attack helicopter, capable of matching the enemy's agility and firepower.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 25

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 Norman BuckleyShot by Tony ImiScored by David NewmanDesigned by Joseph T Garrity

Box Office

1990 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.7× 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

$14.8M

Budget$22.0M
Worldwide gross$14.8M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $7.6M 51% of its US run. Front-loaded — most of its money arrived opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $7.6M51% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 2,006 theaters

Also known as

  • Air Borne - Flügel aus Stahlde
  • Airborne - Flügel aus Stahlde
  • Fire Birdsen
  • Apache pioggia di fuocoit

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