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Poster for The Borrowers
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Released
1997 · FILM

The Borrowers

A tiny family of secretive borrowers must outwit a ruthless lawyer determined to evict their human hosts and raze their hidden home, risking exposure to the giant world above.

Little People. Big Trouble. Lots of fun.

Directed by
Runtime
87 min
AdventureComedyFamily

Synopsis

The four-inch-tall Clock family lives in secret with the normal-sized Lender family, using items such as thread, safety pins, batteries, and scraps of food without their knowledge. Their quiet coexistence is disrupted when the malicious lawyer Ocious P. Potter steals the will that grants ownership of the house, intending to demolish it to construct apartments. The Lenders are compelled to relocate, putting the Clocks at risk of being discovered by the larger world.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 23

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 David FreemanShot by Trevor BrookerScored by Harry Gregson WilliamsDesigned by Gemma Jackson

Box Office

1997 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.8× 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

$22.6M

Budget$29.0M
Worldwide gross$22.6M
break-even (2.5×)

Also known as

  • Ein Fall für die Borgerde
  • Los Borrowerses
  • Le Petit Monde des Borrowersfr
  • I rubacchiottiit

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