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Poster for Heaven Can Wait
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Released
1978 · FILM

Heaven Can Wait

A star quarterback on the brink of a Super Bowl triumph is mistakenly whisked away to heaven, forcing him to hijack a murdered millionaire’s body and race against time to reclaim his life and lead his team to victory.

“Joe Pendleton... the only guy who ever raised Hell about going to Heaven.”

Directed by
Warren Beatty, Buck Henry
Written by
Elaine May, Warren Beatty
Runtime
101 min
ComedyFantasyRomance
Streaming on
  • MGM+

Synopsis

Joe Pendleton is a quarterback preparing to lead his team to the Super Bowl when he is nearly killed in an accident. An overanxious angel brings him to heaven but soon realizes that Pendleton was not ready to die and that his body has already been cremated. A new body must be found, and that of a recently murdered millionaire is selected. His wife and accountant—the murderers—are baffled by this turn of events, as he uses the new body to buy the L.A. Rams and once again attempt to quarterback them into the Super Bowl.

Credits

Actors
Editor
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Director of Photography
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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 20

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 Robert C JonesShot by William A FrakerScored by Dave GrusinDesigned by Paul Sylbert

Box Office

1978 · Box office

💰 Box-office hit — grossed 6.6× 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

$98.8M

Budget$15.0M
Worldwide gross$98.8M
break-even (2.5×)

US & Canada: $81.6M — 83% of worldwide · International: $17.2M (17%)

Opening weekend: $3.7M — 4% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.

Peak 540 theaters

Also known as

  • Der Himmel kann wartende
  • Der Himmel soll wartende
  • El cielo puede esperares
  • Le ciel peut attendrefr
  • Il paradiso può attendereit

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