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Poster for Mighty Joe Young
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Released
1949 · FILM

Mighty Joe Young

“Merian Cooper's amazing adventure in the unusual!”

Directed by
Ernest B Schoedsack
Written by
Ruth Rose, Merian C Cooper
Runtime
94 min
AdventureDramaFantasy
Streaming on
  • Disney+

Synopsis

Jill Young was raised on her father's ranch in Africa, where she cared for a young gorilla named Joe from infancy. Many years later, she brought Joe to Hollywood with the goal of making him a movie star.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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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 Ted CheesmanShot by J Roy HuntScored by Roy Webb

Box Office

1949 · Box office

⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 1.1× 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

$1.9M

Budget$1.8M
Worldwide gross$1.9M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Panik um King Kongde
  • Monsieur Joefr
  • Il re dell'Africait

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