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Poster for Raise the Red Lantern
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Released
1991 · FILM

Raise the Red Lantern

A young widow becomes the fourth concubine of a powerful warlord and must outwit his jealous wives to secure her place in the household before the deadly rivalry consumes them all.

China, 1920. One Master, Four Wives.

Directed by
Written by
Rated
BBFC · PG
Runtime
125 min
Language
ZH
DramaRomance

Synopsis

In 1920s China, 19-year-old Songlian becomes a concubine of a powerful lord and is forced to compete with his three wives for the privileges they offer.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 19

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 Yuan DuShot by Lun YangScored by Naoki Tachikawa

Box Office

1991 · Box office

💰 Box-office hit — grossed 17× 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

$16.6M

Budget$1.0M
Worldwide gross$16.6M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Da hong deng long gao gao guade
  • Die Rote Laternede
  • Rote Laternede
  • Raise the Red Lanternen
  • Dà Hóng Dēnglóng Gāogāo Guàes
  • Épouses et concubinesfr
  • Lanterne rosseit

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