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Poster for Moby Dick
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Released
1956 · FILM

Moby Dick

A young sailor aboard the Pequod must navigate a tyrannical captain’s vengeful quest for a legendary white whale, risking his life and the fate of the entire crew.

The man – The whale – The vengeance – The mightiest adventure ever seen!

Directed by
Runtime
115 min
AdventureDrama

Synopsis

In 1841, a young man named Ishmael joins the crew of the whaling ship *Pequod*, which departs from New Bedford. The vessel is commanded by Captain Ahab, a rigid and demanding leader who is obsessed with the pursuit of Moby Dick, a massive white whale. Ahab lost his leg in a previous encounter with the whale and is driven by a desire for vengeance. The crew quickly realizes that he will not hesitate to go to any lengths to achieve his goal.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 15

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 Russell LloydShot by Oswald MorrisScored by Philip Sainton

Box Office

1956 · Box office

⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 2.3× 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

$10.4M

Budget$4.5M
Worldwide gross$10.4M
break-even (2.5×)

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