Skip to main content
Filmarian
All films
Poster for The NeverEnding Story
Sign in to rateBe the first to rate
+ write a review
Released
1984 · FILM

The NeverEnding Story

A timid boy steals a mysterious book and discovers he alone can enter its magical realm to save it from an all‑consuming void before the story—and his own reality—vanish forever.

“A boy who needs a friend finds a world that needs a hero in a land beyond imagination!”

Directed by
Wolfgang Petersen
Written by
Wolfgang Petersen, Herman Weigel
Rated
MPA · PG
Runtime
101 min
Language
DE
AdventureDramaFamily

Synopsis

While hiding from bullies in his school's attic, a young boy discovers the extraordinary land of Fantasia through a magical book titled *The Neverending Story*. The book follows the story of Atreyu, a young warrior who, with the help of a luck dragon named Falkor, must save Fantasia from the threat of The Nothing.

Credits

Actors
Editor
Director of Photography
Writers
Director

Related titles

No curated related titles yet. Use the edit affordance to add "More from this director", "Same franchise", or "Adaptation source material" entries — every change goes through the wiki review queue.

How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 33

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 Jane SeitzShot by Jost VacanoScored by Klaus Doldinger

Box Office

1984 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.7× 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

$20.2M

Budget$27.0M
Worldwide gross$20.2M
break-even (2.5×)

Opening weekend: $4.3M — 21% of its US run.

Opening week (7-day): $6.7M — 33% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 950 theaters

Full synopsis

Also known as

  • Die unendliche Geschichtede
  • The NeverEnding Storyen
  • L'Histoire sans finfr
  • La storia infinitait

Community tags

Be the first to tag this page — tags appear right away. Try a theme, capability, or subject (e.g. WWII, heist, slow burn, time travel, A24).