Skip to main content
Filmarian
All films
Poster for The Spanish Prisoner
Sign in to rateBe the first to rate
+ write a review
Released
1997 · FILM

The Spanish Prisoner

A brilliant but trusting engineer strives to secure funding for his groundbreaking technology, only to become the target of a sophisticated confidence scheme that threatens to ruin his career and freedom.

It's the oldest con in the book.

Directed by
Written by
Runtime
110 min
DramaMysteryThriller
Streaming on
  • Prime Video

Synopsis

A man who develops a confidential technique soon discovers he is isolated, as both his colleagues and the company he is employed by become adversarial toward him.

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: 21

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 Barbara TulliverShot by Gabriel BeristainScored by Carter BurwellDesigned by Tim Galvin

Box Office

1997 · Box office

⚖️ Fell short of break-even — grossed 1.4× 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

$13.8M

Budget$10.0M
Worldwide gross$13.8M
break-even (2.5×)

Re-release box office

20191 theaters
$4K($5K today)

Domestic gross earned in theatrical re-release, by year · adjusted for inflation

Also known as

  • Die unsichtbare Fallede
  • La tramaes
  • La Prisonnière espagnolefr
  • La formulait

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).

Help complete this page

We’re missing mpaa rating. Sign in to add what you know.