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Poster for Microcosmos
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Released
1996 · FILM

Microcosmos

“15 years of research. 2 years of equipment design. 3 years of shooting. One great movie to restore your sense of wonder.”

Directed by
Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou
Written by
Claude Nuridsany, Marie Perennou
Runtime
80 min
Language
FR
Documentary
Streaming on
  • The Criterion Channel

Synopsis

This documentary explores insect life in meadows and ponds, utilizing incredible close-ups, slow motion, and time-lapse photography to capture their behaviors. It features bees collecting nectar, ladybugs consuming mites, snails mating, spiders wrapping their prey, a scarab beetle persistently pushing a ball of dung uphill, endless lines of caterpillars, an underwater spider constructing an air bubble to live in, and a mosquito hatching.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Directors

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 10

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 Florence RicardShot by Thierry MachadoScored by Bruno Coulais

Box Office

1996 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.2× 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

$1.4M

Budget$5.8M
Worldwide gross$1.4M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $35K — 2% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.

Peak 2 theaters

Also known as

  • Mikrokosmos - Das Volk der Gräserde
  • Microcosmosen
  • Microcosmos : Le Peuple de l'herbefr
  • Microcosmos - Il popolo dell'erbait

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