Mao's Last Dancer
“Before you can fly, you have to be free.”
Synopsis
At the age of 11, Li was selected from a poor Chinese village by Madame Mao's cultural delegates and taken to Beijing to study ballet. In 1979, during a cultural exchange in Texas, he fell in love with an American woman. Two years later, he defected and went on to perform as a principal dancer for the Houston Ballet and as a principal artist with the Australian Ballet.
Credits
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How many hands made this film
The scale of the collaboration
Principal cast & crew: 18
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 Mark WarnerShot by Peter JamesScored by Christopher GordonDesigned by Herbert Pinter
Box Office
2009 · Box office
📉 Underperformed — grossed 1.0× 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
$23.9M
US & Canada: $4.8M — 20% of worldwide · International: $19.1M (80%)
Also known as
- Mao's letzter Tänzerde
- Maos letzter Tänzerde
- Mao's Last Danceren
- El último bailarín de Maoes
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Cast & Crew
18 unique people credited
Top billed cast
Directors
1Writers
2Producers
1Other crew
4Parents Guide
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