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Poster for The Cotton Club
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Released
1984 · FILM

The Cotton Club

A talented jazz pianist fights to keep his music alive and protect the legendary Cotton Club from the violent grip of mob boss Dutch Schultz, risking everything for fame and survival in Harlem’s roaring underworld.

“Where deals were made, lives were traded and the legends of jazz lit up the night.”

Directed by
Francis Ford Coppola
Written by
William Kennedy, Francis Ford Coppola
Rated
MPA · R
Format
Shot on 35mm film
Runtime
129 min
CrimeDramaMusic

Synopsis

The Cotton Club in 1920s and 1930s Harlem featured jazz musicians, dancers, club owners, and notable guests such as gangster Dutch Schultz.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

Related titles

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

A crew of 276+ credited

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 Robert Q LovettShot by Stephen GoldblattScored by John BarryDesigned by Richard Sylbert

Box Office

1984 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.4× 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

$25.9M

Budget$58.0M
Worldwide gross$25.9M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $2.9M — 11% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $4.2M — 16% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 808 theaters

Also known as

  • Cotton Clubde
  • The Cotton Club: Encoreen
  • Cotton Clubes
  • Cotton Clubfr

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