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Poster for The Handmaid's Tale
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Released
1990 · FILM

The Handmaid's Tale

A young woman struggles to survive in a theocratic dystopia where her rare fertility makes her a pawn in a brutal system of state-sanctioned sexual slavery.

“A haunting tale of sexuality in a country gone wrong.”

Directed by
Volker Schlondorff
Written by
Margaret Atwood, Harold Pinter
Runtime
108 min
DramaRomanceSci-Fi
Streaming on
  • Paramount+

Synopsis

In a dystopian society marked by pollution and a dominant right-wing religious regime, a young woman is forced into sexual slavery due to her rare fertility.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Production Designer
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 27

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 RayShot by Igor LutherScored by Ryuichi SakamotoDesigned by Thomas A Walsh

Box Office

1990 · 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

$5.0M

Budget$13.0M
Worldwide gross$5.0M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $739K — 15% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $1.0M — 21% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 117 theaters

Also known as

  • Die Geschichte der Dienerinde
  • The Handmaid's Tale - Die Geschichte der Dienerinde
  • El cuento de la doncellaes
  • La Servante écarlatefr
  • Il racconto dell'ancellait

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