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Poster for The River
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Released
1984 · FILM

The River

He might be able to hold back the river. But could he hold back the greed of man?

Directed by
Runtime
122 min
Drama

Synopsis

Tom and Mae Garvey are a farming couple from Tennessee struggling to protect their land from devastating floods. In addition to battling the natural disasters, they work to prevent a self-serving land developer and a local corporation from foreclosing on their farm. While Mae remains at home to care for their children and manage the crops, Tom takes a job as a scab at a steel mill in an effort to save his family's property.

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How many hands made this film

The scale of the collaboration

Principal cast & crew: 22

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 Sidney LevinShot by Vilmos ZsigmondScored by John WilliamsDesigned by Charles Rosen

Box Office

1984 · Box office

📉 Underperformed — grossed 0.6× 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

$11.5M

Budget$18.0M
Worldwide gross$11.5M
break-even (2.5×)

US & Canada: $11.5M 100% of worldwide · International: $10K (0%)

Opening weekend: $52K 0% of its US run. It had legs — it kept earning long after opening weekend.

Opening week (7-day): $52K0% of its US & Canada run.

Peak 3 theaters

Also known as

  • Menschen am Flussde
  • Menschen am Flußde
  • Cuando el río crecees
  • La Rivièrefr
  • Il fiume dell'irait

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