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Poster for The Man Who Wasn't There
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Released
1983 · FILM

The Man Who Wasn't There

“Being invisible gets you into spy rings, diplomatic circles, and the girls' locker room.”

Directed by
Bruce Malmuth
Written by
Stanford Sherman
Runtime
111 min
ActionAdventureComedy
Streaming on
  • Paramount+

Synopsis

When he accidentally takes possession of a top-secret invisibility potion while en route to his wedding, government bureaucrat Sam Cooper finds himself engulfed in a madcap free-for-all as Russians and other bad guys try to get the substance. To elude the Reds, his own State Department bosses and his livid fiancée, Cooper takes the vanishing juice himself—which only makes matters worse.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

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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 Harry KellerShot by Frederick MooreScored by Miles Goodman

Box Office

1983 · 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

$2.4M

Budget$6.5M
Worldwide gross$2.4M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $1.4M — 56% of its US run. Front-loaded — most of its money arrived opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $2.1M — 85% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 980 theaters

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